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11	Exploring the Help-seeking / Helping Dynamic in Illegal Drug Use Polych, Carol 01 March 2011 (has links) Heuristic qualitative research techniques (Moustakas,1990) were used to explore the dynamic of the help-seeking / helping relationship in illegal drug use from the perspective of the professional. Six professionals, expert in helping people living with an addiction, shared their opinions and insights, analyzed problems, explained the rewards, and made recommendations for improvement, based on their own practices within the health care and social services systems. These professionals identify stigma as a major barrier to the provision of quality care in addictions, and analysis shows that a cultural predilection for scapegoating underlies the application of stigma. The many layered social purposes served by the designation of certain substances as illegal and the utility of scapegoating to hegemonic, vested interests is surveyed. This thesis reviews the true social costs of addictions, the entrenched and enmeshed nature of the alternate economy, and the many above ground institutions and professions sustained by the use of drugs designated as illegal. Prohibition and imprisonment as a response to illegal drug use is exposed as costly, inhumane, dangerous, and overwhelmingly counterproductive in terms of limiting harm from illegal drug use. A recent example of drug prohibition propaganda is deconstructed. Consideration is given to the role of the Drug War as a vehicle to accelerate social creep toward a fragmented self-disciplining surveillance society of consumer-producers in the service of economic elites. Classism is brought forward from a fractured social ground characterized by many splits: sexism, racism, age-ism, able-ism, size-ism, locationism, linguism, and others, to better track the nature of the social control that illegal drugs offer to economic elites. The moral loading that surrounds illegal drug use is deconstructed and the influence of religion is presented for discussion. The primitive roots of human understanding that endorse the ritual Drug War and its supporting mythology, leading to the demonization of illegal drugs and the people who use them, are uncovered. Direction is taken from Benner and Wrubel’s Primacy of Caring (1989) and other leaders in the professions as a means to move practitioners away from their roles as agents of social control into a paradigm of social change. addiction illegal drugs helping-seeking / helping helping relationship stigma anomie illegalization heuristic research professionalization consumerism arts-informed research Benner & Wrubel Goffman Link & Phelan Moustakas quality of care scapegoating prohibition prison harm-reduction drug propaganda drug war surveillance society classism elitism discrimination barriers to care mythology social control drug demonization teaching health care mental health infectious disease industrial disease Wittgenstein hegemony policing legalization education training power social violence institutionalized violence care attitude marginalization alienation Marx Chomsky infectious disease communicable disease 0516 0347 0627 0573 0700

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Exploring the Help-seeking / Helping Dynamic in Illegal Drug Use