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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The recently reported rise in drug abuse in the United States has led to a national perception of a drug crisis that requires immediate and far-reaching control efforts. Despite past experiences with drug control, the current drug crisis is occurring at a time of unprecedented adversarial relationships between the high demand for drugs and the national efforts to thwart the supply of narcotics. / From 1914 to the present, most observers argue that various anti-drug control strategies have been ineffective in controlling the so-called menace or crisis. These efforts are thought to have amplified the drug problem while stimulating symbolic crusades. Previous studies have attempted to single out the significant elements underlying the development of reforms to control illegal drugs. Underlying these studies is the importance of a single factor as being responsible for the adoption of a particular anti-drug policy. / Unlike previous studies, a major argument of this study is that the current anti-drug campaign is part of a periodic cycle of crisis. While rooted in the past, it serves to reinforce existing strategies of social control. This argument implies the notion of a process or stages of development and that several salient issues provide the particular social context from which control efforts have direct relevance. The appearance of newspaper articles regarding the drug problem is heightening the official and public sensitivities about the existence and nature of the drug problem. For this study, a sample of drug-related articles were content analyzed for the vocabularies that motivated the so-called drug crisis. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-03, Section: A, page: 1084. / Major Professor: Thomas Blomberg. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

This paper will focus upon the value positions underlying two social work models: the traditional or psychodynamic and that of behavior modification. It is recognized that there are areas in which those two approaches do not seem far removed, e.g., with some neo-behaviorists and/or some ego psychologists. However, to the extent that the lines become very blurred, so does the clarity of position or practice. Like many practitioners who claim to be “eclectic,” it becomes extremely difficult to find out where they are and what they do value at a given point in time. Why do social workers become so caught up in treatment facts? Because they have not clearly defined what they value and where those values lead them. In order to demonstrate that the profession of social work has moved from position to position, this paper will first sketch briefly the early history of social casework. Second, the paper will focus upon some of the basic dangers involved in "borrowing" from the knowledge of other disciplines. Finally, two major practice models, the traditional model and the behavior modification model will be described both in terms of their nature and development and in terms of their conflictual value positions. Social workers need to be cautious not only to identify the values from which they are operating, but also to be certain that their positions are not too narrow or simplistic for the effective dealing with life.

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

Among the range of social and economic problems known to disproportionately affect homeless persons, research has repeatedly confirmed that homeless populations are substantially more likely to indicate problems with substance abuse than are evidenced in housed populations. Those considering the potential causal implications associated with this correlation have frequently implicated drug abuse as a key precipitant of downward mobility among the substance abusive homeless, emphasizing its acknowledged potential for undermining work or family or other social ties. Cued by such logic, the past decade has witnessed the development of numerous remedial endeavors geared primarily toward aiding homeless abusers to alter their drug behaviors. These programs have continually encountered limited success, as high rates of program attrition and relapse subsequent to treatment have continually conspired to frustrate the ambitions of administrators. This dissertation considers the crucial question of why such outcomes have been so common Explored in this project are the presumably crucial roles played by motivational factors in promoting 'recovery.' Using data from one treatment agenda that targeted the drug problems of adult homeless substance abusers, connections between the drug using habits of program clients and a range of alternative social or economic problems known to affect homeless populations are systematically examined. Analyses reveal that clients facing the most severe employment- and family-related handicaps were the least likely to report improvements with respect to drug consumption, consistent with the premise that incentives to retire these habits are significantly less among those indicating the least to gain, economically or socially, from retention of sobriety. Insofar as findings reinforce the conclusion that drug usage is likely as much an effect as a source of other hardships to which homeless abusers are associated, they bear relevance for treatment providers. These data suggest that, unless future programs are equipped to deal with other economic and social problems of homeless abusers, success rates will continue to be discouraging / acase@tulane.edu