Doin' Drugs: Patterns of African American Addiction

By Stephen L. Johnson and William H. James

Throughout the African American community, individuals and organizations ranging from churches to schools to drug treatment centers are fighting the widespread use of crack cocaine. To put that fight in a larger cultural context, Doin' Drugs explores historical patterns of alcohol and drug use from pre-slavery Africa to present-day urban America.

William Henry James and Stephen Lloyd Johnson document the role of alcohol and other drugs in traditional African cultures, among African slaves before the American Civil War, and in contemporary African American society, which has experienced the epidemics of marijuana, heroin, crack cocaine, and gangs since the beginning of this century. The authors zero in on the interplay of addiction and race to uncover the social and psychological factors that underlie addiction.

James and Johnson also highlight many culturally informed programs, particularly those sponsored by African American churches, that are successfully breaking the patterns of addiction. The authors hope that the information in this book will be used to train a new generation of counselors, ministers, social workers, nurses, and physicians to be better prepared to face the epidemic of drug addiction in African American communities.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0292740417
• ISBN13: 9780292740419
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Length: 189 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Patterns of African American Addiction

Doing Drugs; Patterns of African American Addiction is a text that comes right out of the battle fields of drug treatment.The authors, a preacher and a college professor seem familar with their subject. My favorite chapters are on the history of African American addiction. A loty of times we think addiction just happened in the sixities and miss that their is a history of addiction that is mixed up with racial opression as well as the urbanization of African American people.New information for me was the African American drinking rituals that happened in slavery as well as the use of alcohol as awards for crop picking by slave masters durning slavery.I also was intersted in the African section of the book that recorded drug use (Quat) in North Africa as long as 500 years ago.The chapter on cocaine treament and the approaches to treating it in African American males is especially helpful. I liked the discusiion and questioning of compliance in therapy. I had never examined that most drug treatment for black males is forced treatment.