Work

Crystal methamphetamine use among American Indian and White youth in Appalachia: Social context, masculinity, and desistance

Year: 2010

Type: article

Abstract: Rural areas and American Indian reservations are hotspots for the use of crystal methamphetamine ("meth") in the United States, yet there is little ethnographic data describing meth use in these areas. This study draws upon three years of ethnographic work conducted with American Indian and White youth in Appalachia during the height of the meth epidemic. It describes how historical, cultural, and socioeconomic processes influence vulnerability to meth use in Appalachia, and highlights the role of social relationships and meaning-making in facilitating desistance and recovery from meth use. The first section shows how crystal meth filled a particular functional niche in the lives of many young men, alleviating boredom and anomie linked to recent socioeconomic changes and labor opportunities in the region, and intersecting with local understandings of masculinity and forms of military identity. Here, ethnographic and interview data converge to illustrate how social role expectations, recent socioeconomic change, and meth's pharmacological properties converge to create vulnerability to meth use in Appalachia. The second section draws upon two American Indian narratives of desistance. These youth described recently severed social relationships and acute feelings of social isolation during the initiation of meth use. Both also described dramatic close calls with death that facilitated their eventual desistance from use, involving repaired social relationships and the establishment of new lives and hope. These interviews illustrate how changes in social relationships were linked with both initiation and desistance from meth use, and how religious interpretations of near-death experiences structured narratives of cessation and redemption.

Source: Addiction Research & Theory

DOI: 10.3109/16066350902802319

Author: Ryan A. Brown

Institution: Northwestern University

Language: English

Topic: Youth, Drugs, and Violence

Subfield: Demography

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Good health and well-being, Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: green

Funders: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, University of California, San Francisco, National Institute of Mental Health