An Evaluation of Drug Treatment - Essay Example

The answer may be found in the second article.  Perhaps if the approach taken was a cultural one, society, in general, would look at addiction for what it is…a disease. Historically speaking, addiction was never looked at through culture but merely as man’s weakness for the drink. In the nineteenth century, the temperance movement argued that alcohol inevitably provoked a loss of control. That is, the nineteenth-century view of alcohol addiction is exactly that which in the twentieth century has been connected to narcotics: that the drug is inherently addictive so that regular use guarantees an enslavement of the individual that leads progressively to moral collapse and death. This idea of progressive, irreversible, inevitable exacerbation of the habit, causing loss of control of personal behavior and of the ability to make moral discriminations, actually retains strong elements of both colonial and temperance moralism. It is therefore not correct to say simply that modern disease notions have replaced outdated "moral" models of drug use. Rather, relabeling misbehavior as a medical consequence of drug use locates the source of evil in the drug and dictates that the addict's moral responsibility is to avoid the substance entirely--that is, to abstain.

If the Strengthening Families Program was applied culturally, weakness would not be the focal point. Instead, the vulnerability would. And who better apply the model, than the minority treatment specialist? The article correctly points out that there are not enough minority researchers. This alone creates a conflict because we have a predominantly white field attempting to guide minority drug abusers when whites have no personal point of reference with many minorities. This is not to say that treatment should be segregated, but that it is a cultural consideration that should be recognized.