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Ethnicity and Race in Drug and Alcohol Research
Michael Morrissey
Northern NSW University Department of Rural Health, Newcastle, NSW
Abstract
This article reviews the (predominantly American) research literature on the ethnic and 'racial' aspects of drug and alcohol use over the last thirty years. The main conclusion to emerge from this review is a substantial disjuncture between theory and practice. Over the last twenty years there has been a sustained theoretical critique of approaches which utilize broad ethnic and 'racial' categories as the basis of epidemiological comparison, and this critique has apparently been effective in the sense that few, if any, researchers would dispute its essential arguments. Nevertheless, the dominant empirical mode of research in the field is one which continues to employ these (theoretically) discredited categories.
Two arguments are offered to explain this contradiction. The first is that the critique of what I label 'categorical positivism' in this field has itself been impoverished by inadequate theoretical approaches to the concepts of ethnicity and race. Secondly, the USA is a deeply racialised society and the 'war on drugs' reflects this in very fundamental ways. It is not surprising that the social epidemiology of drug and alcohol use is deeply affected by the racialisation of the society which produces it.
Keywords
sociology, drugs, ethnicity, race, racism, enforcement
Article Text
This paper argues that there is a pervasive contradiction at the heart of research into the ethnic aspects of alcohol and other drug use and provides an explanation for its persistence. This will be accomplished by exclusive reference to literature originating in the United States since the volume of research and publishing from this source both dwarfs, and profoundly influences, research on ethnicity, alcohol and other drugs in the rest of the world.
The contradiction is that over the last twenty years a sustained critique has been made of those epidemiological approaches whose method is to utilise broad ethnic and 'race' categories as the basis for quantitative examination of differences in such indicators as alcohol abuse between these categories. In spite of widespread acceptance of this critique by an impressive number of researchers however, the object of this critique remains the dominant empirical method of researching and publicising the rôle of ethnicity in relation to alcohol and other drug use. So deep is this contradiction, in fact, that it is possible to find eminent researchers (empirically) utilising in one publication the very methods they have (theoretically) repudiated in others (see for example, Caetano et al 1997, 1998).
The explanation of this continuing contradiction operates at two levels. Most obviously, as I shall argue, there are powerful historical and political influences which maintain the prevalence of the ethnic/race categories in question, wherever the flow of academic opinion might be going at any given time: in particular, in the United States. However, there is a less obvious, though equally far-reaching, strand of explanation: namely that the critique of what I might call categorical positivism in the field of ethnicity and drug studies has itself been theoretically impoverished due to its general failure to incorporate some of the most important theoretical insights of 'race' and ethnic studies.
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