Computer Integrated Drug Prevention–Combining Multi-Media and Social Group Work Practice to Teach Inner City Israeli 6th Graders How to Say No to Drugs

SUMMARY

The author describes an educational multi-media program to teach Israeli youth to avoid drugs using an older brother model who provides information and advice to youthful Israeli players regarding the adverse consequences of using drugs.     

Substance Use Training Experiences and Needs: Findings From a National Survey of Social Care Professionals in England

For more than 30 years there have been calls in the UK to improve training for social workers in relation to substance use. Yet very little research has explored what training practitioners have received or what their training needs are. This study sought to establish practitioners' experiences of previous training in substance use and identify their current training needs. An online survey was disseminated to 3,164 practitioners in adults' (AS) and children's (CS) social care and 12 vignette-based focus groups were also held. Of the final sample of 597, more than a third of social workers had not received any training and a further fifth only received between one and four hours. Other social care staff fared worse. Overwhelmingly, respondents said that substance use knowledge and skills were very important to their practice but their professional education had not prepared them well. They identified a number of training needs including ‘how to talk to people about substance use’ and ‘the types of intervention and treatment available’. Most social care professionals report not being adequately prepared for working with substance use, particularly basic knowledge and skills which would help them to conduct assessments and signpost people to specialist substance services.     

What does self-esteem have to do with behavioral health among low-income youth in Chicago?

Many studies have examined risk factors associated with poorer behavioral health among low-income African American youth, such as low school engagement, delinquency, mental health problems, drug use, and risky sex. However, fewer studies have examined protective factors for such behavioral health risk behaviors. This study sought to address this gap by examining whether high levels of self-esteem were associated with better behavioral health factors for this population. A survey was administered to a sample of 638 low-income African American adolescents in Chicago to examine the degree to which high self-esteem was associated with less delinquency, substance use, and sexual risk behaviors, and more school engagement, and whether such associations varied by gender. Stepwise linear and logistic regression models were estimated to assess the influence of self-esteem. Higher self-esteem for this sample of low-income African American adolescents was associated with lower rates of delinquency, drug use, and risky sexual behaviors and increased rates of school engagement. Gender moderated only a few of these relationships. These findings suggest that programs that promote high self–esteem alone or in combination with other resilience factors may promote better behavioral health factors for African American adolescents.     

从《世说新语》看服药的士族精神

作为士族神仙道教的组成部分 ,魏晋时期士族文人服药的主要目的是为了满足自己精神上逍遥和肉体上享乐的需要。《世说新语》中士族服药的故事 ,不仅体现了它与帝王服用丹药和民众服符的不同 ,而且还集中体现了士族神仙道教中的“地仙”思想     

三地汤解开现代化养鸡业中啄癖的谜

以祖国中医学和现代新兴学科家畜行为学的理论为根据,解决与现代化养鸡业中育雏期鸡群啄癖的迷,为生产部门杜绝啄癖提供防范措施。     

Youthful Violence: Problems and Prospects

This is a study of 758 adolescents, aged 13 to 18 years, randomly selected from two public high schools in the South. The purpose is to examine the relative relationships between several predictors and violence in two age groups (ages 15 and younger versus 16 and older), and to investigate interactions between several of the predictors within these age groups. As hypothesized, there are differences in which factors predict violence according to age, and interactions between these predictors also differ between the two age groups. The social work practice implications of these findings are discussed.     

Making It Happen: The Case for Compromise in the Federal Cocaine Law Debate

The US has taken an active role in formulating drugs policy for over a century, and thus much debate on how best to control drug use occurs in that country. Though most Americans support keeping drugs illegal, voices for changing the specifics of how prohibition is administered have grown louder and more effective in the past ten years—witness the recent success on the state and local level for rolling back restrictions on medical cannabis or punitive state mandatory minimum penalties (i.e. Rockefeller drug laws). Expectedly, these successful reforms have happened with the support of voters in those particular states and localities where reforms have been introduced. On the federal level, the accusation of racism has become a familiar cry among anti‐prohibitionists, who argue that cocaine laws, in particular, disproportionately affect African‐Americans and contribute to racial division. The federal government makes a great distinction in sentencing between powder cocaine, usually snorted, and crack cocaine, which is smoked. A person caught in possession of five grams of crack gets an automatic mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison. Possessing cocaine in its powder form does not carry a mandatory minimum. Additionally, these laws are the target of much debate because, for trafficking in the drug, it takes 100 times more powder cocaine than crack to trigger the same mandatory minimum penalty (the so‐called “100 to 1 quantity ratio”). I will argue that repealing the mandatory minimum sentence for crack is both justified based on the evidence and politically viable. Although the number of people affected by this law every year is minuscule, African‐Americans are undoubtedly disproportionately affected by the penalty. Eliminating the provision should not be expected to have a deleterious effect on crime or drug control efforts, and would instead have a positive effect in reinvigorating faith in the criminal justice system and in promoting positive race relations. Very importantly, it is a politically realistic reform for making prohibition work better. Erasing or dramatically changing the more controversial 100 to 1 quantity ratio—though affecting far more people than the mandatory minimum for crack possession—may or may not justify itself based on the evidence. Nonetheless, it is certainly not a politically realistic option for lawmakers.     

Breaking Bad,Making Good: Notes on a Televisual Tourist Industry

This article explores emerging intersections between the consumption of mediated popular culture and the real and imagined topographies within which those representations are framed. Through an examination of the ‘televisual tourism’ centred around the successful TV series Breaking Bad, we scrutinise the multiple modes of sensorial and embodied travel experience enjoyed by fans of the show as they consume their way around the show’s sites, scenes and tastes in the city of Albuquerque. This exploitation of media textuality through fan tourism is, we suggest, centred upon a carefully managed commodification of crime, criminality and transgression.     

Refusing to Listen: Are We Failing the Needs of People with Alcohol and Drug Problems?

This paper argues that social work education in the UK has persistently failed to equip its social workers with the knowledge to work effectively with people with alcohol and drug problems. In spite of continuing criticism of the profession's unwillingness or inability to engage with substance use issues, social work education has failed to respond to the calls for better training on this subject, even when specific guidance has been issued about course content. This results in a failure to meet the needs of our service users as well as social work staff who remain frustrated at their inability to intervene. The paper explores the historical and current debate about social work training in relation to alcohol and drugs and identifies the barriers to its inclusion in qualifying and post‐qualifying (PQ) curricula. Finally it offers a strategy for improving social work training as well as an overview of programme content requirements.     

Putting Ecstasy to Work: Pleasure,Prostitution, and Inequality in the Indonesian Borderlands

This article takes the drug Ecstasy as a commodity located at the center rather than at the margins of social processes, a technology that allows for the temporary engagement with pleasure and displacement of inequality in the context of nightlife and prostitution. It addresses these issues by focusing ethnographic attention on how Indonesian female prostitutes and their Singaporean male clients use Ecstasy in a disco on the Indonesian island of Batam, an export-processing zone located at the border to Singapore. By paying close attention to consumption practices, the article uses Ecstasy as a starting point for illuminating intersections of social mobility and inequality in the context of contemporary forms of transnational capitalism.