Marcos Iraheta

Whether you agree or not that as a country we spend too much or too little on drug rehabilitation, there are trends between races that attribute to these factors. Though it is not explicit in an every day setting, certain ways of thinking can lead to one believing that the government spends too little or too much on drug rehab, based on the race of the folks receiving the treatment. Several studies have analyzed this data and their findings are interesting.

               In Racial Prejudice and Spending on Drug Rehabilitation: The Role of Attitudes Toward Blacks and Latinos, a study done by Amie L. Nielsen, Scott Bonn and George Wilson, these attitudes are studied through the General Social Survey and independent bivariate factors that show a correlation between prejudice and the subjects answers. They used data from only 864 white participants in 1990 and 2000 to find racial and ethnic attitudes that shaped their answers about spending for drug rehabilitation. They did this by looking at their level of prejudice through certain independent variables like how they would feel about a family member marrying a person of another ethnic group and their attitudes about minorities and how hard working they are. They continued pulling data that could categorize them as prejudice to see how it would affect their answers about drug rehab. In their findings, they saw that "color coding" did exist with white participants who answered in a more prejudice manner, especially towards blacks. Those who favored discrimination and lack of opportunity, tended to answer that we spend too little on rehabilitation. In this case, racial attitudes certainly played a significant role in drug policies.

               In a study conducted in 2015 titled Racial/ethnic differences in use of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana: Is there a cross-over from adolescence to adulthood?, subjects were studied to see how their marijuana, alcohol and cigarette habits changed over time. They did so by conducting surveys in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, sampling about 90,000 adolescents in school, who saw a percentage re-contacted through four waves of interviews. All subjects were self-reporting their usage of certain substances and asked across various waves, to analyze their frequency of usage. In their findings they saw that black females had the higher rate of marijuana usage through adulthood, but whites had a higher rate of usage of alcohol and cigarettes than any other group in adolescence. Blacks were also found to engage in more alcohol abuse in adulthood than whites, according to the study.