Objective: The objective of this assignment is to explore someone’s personal experience with drug use or abuse within the framework of the social ecological model and to propose a strategy for addressing this issue through the lens of social justice principles.
You may use your own experience with a drug or multiple drugs (legal or illegal) or focus on a friend or family member’s use of a drug. Ideally, you will know enough detail about this person’s use or misuse of the drug or you should be able to ask them questions to help you better understand their experience. Feel free to give the person a pseudonym and protect their identity in any way you can. Please approach this assignment with sensitivity and respect for the experiences of others.
Note: If you are not able to use the experience of someone you know, then you may select someone whose drug use has received a lot of media attention; ideally you would be able to get in-depth information about their experience from a personal interview, documentary, a biography or a memoir or something other than media accounts.
Instructions:
Introduction (~ 1 page):
Briefly introduce the person, sharing a bit about who they are and their history of use of the drug(s). Please discuss any characteristics, such as age, race/ethnicity, gender/gender identity, class, occupation, geographic location, religion, health status, etc., especially as they may influence their drug use, experience and access to support/treatment. For example, perhaps the person you are describing worked as a nurse (occupation) and was injured on the job, trying to move a patient. At the height of the time doctors were prescribing opioids for pain, they began taking oxycodone and – because of their position in health care – had easy access to prescriptions and refills.
Analysis through the Social Ecological Lens (~2 pp.):
Apply the social ecological model (SEM) to this person’s history of drug use or abuse (see below);
At each level of the SEM, describe the factors that influenced this person’s susceptibility to drug use or their decision to use drugs and their user experience and their continued or prolonged use of the drug
As appropriate, identify any protective factors (at various levels of the SEM) that have helped prevent or mitigate against drug use.
Throughout this section, integrate scholarly research documenting similar risk/protective factors associated with use of this drug(s)
3. Challenges/consequences of drug use (~ 1 page): Discuss any challenges or consequences this person faced as a result of drug use (consider stigma and incarceration in particular) and how they impacted different areas of their life (e.g., relationships, academics or job, mental, physical and spiritual health, finances, etc.).
Proposed Strategy for Change Aligned with Social Justice Principles (~ 1-2 pp.):
Based on your analysis and drawing on research about effective interventions (including policy-level interventions), propose at least one strategy that you think could help to address this person’s use/misuse so that it doesn’t cause as much harm (as discussed above).
Think about strategies that correspond with factors you discussed above, but also those that align with social justice principles such as fairness, equity, transformation of systems, etc.
At what level of the SEM is this strategy? Does it put the responsibility for change on the individual, or is there a way that this strategy might address broader policies or systems that influence drug use/misuse.