Gilbert Quintero

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Montana

In this chapter, we update and extend our previous analysis of drug use among youth and emerging adults (aged 18-25) in North America (Quintero and Nichter 2011) and reiterate a call for ethnographies of pharmakon: substances that straddle the medicine-drug continuum used as resources in the everyday self-management of bodies, minds, moods, and ide...

Alcohol use remains a prominent feature of American collegiate social life. Emerging technological developments, particularly the proliferation of mobile phone cameras and the easy sharing of digital images on social network sites (SNS), are now widely integrated into these drinking practices. This paper presents an exploratory study examining how...

Background: Examining how pharmaceuticals are used to induce pleasure presents a unique opportunity for analyzing not only how pleasure is assembled and experienced through distinct consumption practices but also how mundane medicines can become euphorigenic substances. Methods: Drawing on qualitative research on the non-medical use of prescript...

We examine the experience of boredom and its relationship to troublemaking and drug use among rural youth in southwestern New Mexico. We draw on qualitative research with area youth to describe what they think about drug use and how they situate it within their social circumstances. We then locate youth drug use within globalized processes affectin...

Recent trends in the recreational use of pharmaceuticals among young adults in the United States highlight a number of issues regarding the problematization of drugs. Two constructions of recreational pharmaceutical use are analyzed. On the one hand, categorical frameworks based upon epidemiological data are created by institutions and media and de...

In the early years of the 21st century, methamphetamine became the latest in a long line of drugs to capture the American public’s collective concern. And while many of the attributes of this particular drug use epidemic share similarities with those that came previously, William Garriott, in Policing Methamphetamine, offers a compelling case that...

IntroductionEmerging Drug Use Trends in Socio-Cultural ContextConclusion ReferencesFurther Reading

This study examined the utilization of the Internet by young adults as a source of information for the misuse of prescription drugs. Collected during 2008-2009, the data presented here comes from semistructured interviews (N=62) conducted in a northwestern city of the United States through support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Previous...

The increasing attention paid to community-based research highlights the question of whether human research protections focused on the individual are adequate to safeguard communities. We conducted a study to explore how community members perceive low-risk health research, the adequacy of human research protection processes, and the ethical conduct...

Using a qualitative methodology, the author examined the sociorecreational use of pharmaceuticals in a collegiate setting. In all, 91 college students from a public, 4-year institution for higher learning in the Southwest participated in this study. The author conducted semistructured interviews between May 2004 and December 2005; they then audio r...

In their recent article, N. Spillane and G. Smith (2007) suggested that reservation-dwelling American Indians have higher rates of problem drinking than do either non–American Indians or those American Indians living in nonreservation settings. These authors further argued that problematic alcohol use patterns in reservation communities are due to...

Social science research on polydrug use among young adult college students is scant, adopts definitions of this practice that are often devoid of sociocultural context, and emphasizes a very narrow range of use patterns. This article, based on ethnographic interviews from a study of collegiate prescription drug misuse, expands this focus by offerin...

Evaluation research pertaining to the development of assessment instruments that fully capture the facets of empowerment prevention perspectives among youth are sparse. With funding from the American Legacy Foundation, the University of New Mexico Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, in partnership with the New Mexico State Departmen...

Mandates for culturally competent substance abuse and mental health services call for behavioral health providers to recognize and engage cultural issues. These efforts to incorporate culture typically focus on client culture, but provider views of culture can also influence the provision of services. Analysis of 42 semistructured interviews with b...

Although recent increases in collegiate prescription drug misuse have generated a great deal of concern, there are few analyses available that examine the socio-cultural factors influencing these trends. This article attempts to address this gap in knowledge by providing an analysis of several socio-cultural factors influencing pharmaceutical misus...

Alcohol abuse on college campuses continues to be a significant public health issue and health promotion strategies are being directed at changing the culture of collegiate drinking. From a qualitative research perspective such efforts remain uniformed since this area of research is currently dominated by large-scale surveys that illuminate little...

1 The journal's style utilizes the category substance abuse as a diagnostic category. Substances are used or misused; living organisms are and can be abused. Editor's note. *Correspondence:

This article describes how qualitative social science research has and can contribute to the emerging field of drug and alcohol studies. An eight-stage model of formative-reformative research is presented as a heuristic to outline the different ways in which qualitative research may be used to better understand micro and macro dimensions of drug us...

This article describes how qualitative social science research has and can contribute to the emerging field of drug and alcohol studies. An eight-stage model of formative-reformative research is presented as a heuristic to outline the different ways in which qualitative research may be used to better understand micro and macro dimensions of drug us...

Tobacco use by the young is one of the greatest public health concerns in the United States and is targeted by a number of prevention and control programs. A fuller understanding of the social and cultural values that youths attach to smoking is important in achieving focused, effective prevention strategies. Drawing on data collected through indiv...

This article focuses on how some members of Navajo society use narratives regarding alcohol and drinking to comment on cultural degeneration and the decay of the traditional Navajo moral economy. These narratives drinking are seldom solely about alcohol but refer to a host of distinct yet interrelated concerns involving moral values, individual and...

L'A. montre comment les constructions de la pratique de consommation d'alcool par les Amerindiens ont pour objectif de renforcer et de reproduire les images coloniales de l'Indien, centrant son analyse sur le colonialisme en tant que conquete et controle des images des peuples sur eux-memes et sur les autres ; en tant que phenomene d'implantation d...

This chapter focuses on the diverse range of therapeutic options utilized by Navajos who have experienced problems related to alcohol abuse and dependency. It describes their use of formal treatment modalities such as Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as informal forms of help including family support and religious services provided by both Christian a...

The Navajo exhibit a number of indicators suggesting the extent of significant problems associated with drinking and alcohol abuse. Measures of alcohol-related mortality and morbidity provide stark testimony regarding the shape and magnitude of problem drinking among the Navajo. While these measures highlight patterns of drinking that often result...

To describe the risk factors for conduct disorder before age 15 among Navajo Indians. The study was based on a survey of a stratified random sample of adult Navajo Indians between the ages of 21 and 65 living on and adjacent to two different areas of the Navajo Reservation. There were 531 male and 203 female respondents. The average age (SD) of the...

The purpose of this study is to examine the association between conduct disorder before age 15 and subsequent alcohol dependence, and to describe the lifetime prevalence of alcohol dependence among Navajo Indian women and men. This was a case-control design which included both men (n = 735) and women (n = 351) and in which the Diagnostic Interview...

Objective: The purpose of this study is to examine the association between conduct disorder before age 15 and subsequent alcohol dependence, and to describe the lifetime prevalence of alcohol dependence among Navajo Indian women and men. Method: This was a case-control design which included both men (n = 735) and women (n = 351) and in which the Di...

This paper examines the interrelations between “machismo,” drug use, and aggression among injection drug users (IDUs) in a US-Mexico border community. Underscored is the directive force and social impact of “machismo” in the day-to-day life-worlds of Mexican male heroin addicts, or “tecatos.” This focus not only provides a broad description of the...

To use qualitative and quantitative findings to describe patterns of smoking experimentation and initiation among adolescent girls. Ethnographic in-person interviews, focus groups, telephone interviews, and a survey questionnaire were used over a one-year period. The paper reports on cross-sectional data drawn from a three-year longitudinal study....

Five expert discourses on addiction purport to explain the phenomenon of the semantics of addiction. An assessment of the burgeoning use of this term by the lay public, however, reveals a plethora of socially contextualized and culturally mediated meanings related to addiction that are generally not considered by expert models. Addiction has meanin...

Many studies of different societies throughout the world have noted how discord in prominent social relationships manifests itself as specific illnesses. This paper explores how the discord characteristic of male/female relations is related to illness in Navajo culture and how gender differences as conceptualized in Navajo cosmology are used to fac...