Vulnerabilities and Cultural Change: Drug Use among Puerto Rican Adolescents in the United States

Abstract

The investigations examined drug usage-based and culture-based differences in young Puerto Ricans living in New York (100 nonusers and 192 drug users), Americans living in New York (100 nonusers and 99 drug users), and Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico (100 nonusers and 98 drug users). The Associative Group Analysis method was used to measure cultural change in three dimensions: dominant perceptions, priorities, and evaluations. The findings show that the Puerto Rican drug user and nonuser groups in New York differed significantly in their paths of acculturation. The nonusers were shown to progress successfully in learning American meanings and adopting American perspectives and cultural norms. The drug users were attracted to dominant American priorities (e.g., wealth and freedom) but showed little progress in adopting deeper American cultural meanings necessary for effective coping.

Memory for drug-related visual stimuli in young adult, cocaine-dependent polydrug users

“…11,27 To our knowledge, this preliminary study was the first to use picture cues to examine both implicit and explicit drug related cognition in young adults who were cocaine dependent polydrug users, compared to a similarly aged group with limited lifetime exposure to drugs. Consistent with previous studies demonstrating that cocaine users associate cocaine with positive experiences and feelings 7–9 , the cocaine dependent polydrug users in the current study rated the drug related visual information as more likable than the controls. The cocaine group also found the drug cues more arousing, as Wiers et al 10 observed for cocaine words.…”

“…Within this context, results of past studies, together with those of the present study, provide evidence for implicit cognitive processing in chronic drug users that is distinctive, fast, and positively biased towards verbal and picture drug stimuli across varying extents of participant reflection on the content of the cue. The free association tasks used by Ames et al, 28,29 Stacy, 30 , Szalay et al, 7–9 demonstrated unique drug related implicit cognition when a first word was generated in response to a given word (e.g., cocaine) 7–9 or drug picture. 28–30 The IAT as used by Wiers et al 10 involved assessing associations between cocaine, affect, arousal and sedation (e.g., cocaine-pleasant).…”

“…This study of implicit memory for pictures extends the previous finding that chronic cocaine users had enhanced implicit verbal memory for drug related information. 7–10 Previous studies have examined implicit cognition in marijuana users by using a picture association task wherein participants had to generate a very first word response to a marijuana picture cue and found that associative memory responses were strongly related to drug use. 28–30 The present study extends evidence for drug-related memory facilitation in drug users to include another form of implicit memory that has to do with enhanced implicit drug-related memory processing.…”

“…6 Only a handful of studies have examined implicit memory associations in cocaine users. 7–10 Szalay and colleagues 9 used a free association task wherein participants were asked to write associations in response to a given word (e.g., cocaine). They found that college student cocaine users associated cocaine words with positive experiences and feelings, and were more familiar with cocaine names, methods, and effects than college students who did not use cocaine.…”

Substance use and behaviour disorders in Puerto Rican youth: a migrant family study

“…While this difference was unexpected, it is attributable mainly to greater alcohol use among island Puerto Rican children, a finding that has been previously reported 1. By contrast, the greater rates of cannabis use among offspring of US migrants is a pattern that may be attributable in part to altered parenting practices or greater tolerance for the use of this substance in the mainland environment than in Puerto Rico 23 44 45. A strong association was also observed between parental and child substance use in both mainland and island Puerto Ricans.…”