JODO SHINSIHU IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

Thus, we had to initiate another effort. This was an ethnographic study effort. We tried to show them that there’s a multi-culturisim that occurs with drug abuse. Every group of people, no matter how you want to group people together, they have their own customs, their own language, their own slangs, their own way of doing things, and even their own separate cycles of drug abuse that occur within the larger spectrum of drug abuse in the United States. So, we hired ethnographers. Looking at different youth populations, 13 to 16 and 16 to 19, we wanted to get a handle on drug problems in youth populations of four different areas in San Francisco. We wanted to get a black population of youth, a Hispanic population of youth, an Asian- American population of youth, and a white middle class population of youth. We finally found four locations that would give us that. The problem with that was that the Asian-Americans were too diverse to say that it was an Asian-American study, so we had to narrow our focus. We, therefore, did a Chinatown study and focused on Chinese-American youth, instead of a full Asian- American youth study. However, in our treatment program, we see some similarities in drug use among the Chinese, the Japanese, the Korean, and the Filipino youths, which make the Chinese youth study applicable to these other Asian youth populations.

We found that the black youths, 13 to 16 and 16 to 19, in 1983 to 1985, liked drugs like cocaine, rock cocaine, the crack cocaine, or smokable cocaine, mixed with marijuana, which they called champagne and caviar. At that time, these drugs were specific to that culture; they had value and raised one’s esteem in that culture. They felt proud that they used those drugs and felt that if you use alcohol, you’re sloppy, or a wino; if you use PCP, you’re crazy. Their drugs of esteem were crack cocaine and marijuana.

The Hispanic youth population we looked at in San Francisco during those years liked the drugs called PCP and heroin. There was an epidemic of PCP, an animal tranquillizer that can make you psychotic and creates a wide range of psychedelic reactions. There was twenty percent, a very alarming percent of heroin use among the Hispanic youth population.