Beyond Ideology in Drug Policy: The Primary Prevention Model

Abstract

Drug policy in the United States is heavily influenced by popular and expert ideologies and a social definition of the problem. As a result, public substance abuse policies reflect an incoherent compromise between medical and criminal definitions and approaches to intervention. The effect is that in both conceptions, the problem locus is in the individual user. Thus, contemporary prevention, treatment and rehabilitation strategies fail to account for the myriad socioeconomic correlates of abuse and tend to atomize the problem by reducing it to the lowest common denominator — the drug-abusing person. Primary prevention approaches to drug abuse hold the greatest promise for remediation of this social problem because of the inclusion of macroenvironmental factors in tandem with individual risk factors to form a comprehensive approach to policy formulation.