| This dissertation examines substance use and abuse among adolescents in Bogotá, Colombia. Using a biocultural approach, it presents research on the risk factors for substance abuse and the cultural context around the relatively low levels of drug use in Bogotá. Seventeen months of ethnographic research was carried out with male and female adolescents aged 12 to 19 at a secondary school and a treatment center. Methods included participant observation, informal interviewing, an interview on drug attitudes, a risk factor survey, and an interview on risk factors and experiences with substance use.; Two hundred and sixty-seven adolescents completed the survey. Using the dichotomous variable of “addicted” status, logistic regression analyses indicated that five variables account for substance abuse in the sample. These are: the cultural model of “social distance from drugs,” the motive “to feel good” from use, an individual's experience of armed violence, the number of delinquent friends, and incentive salience, the proposed function of one of the main brain systems involved in substance abuse.; This “incentive salience” theory of addiction was examined using both ethnographic and survey data. Results indicate the importance of an expanded conception of salience that focuses on “wanting” and attention in drug seeking and drug use. Moreover, incentive salience can be combined with positive and negative affect (e.g., the “high and withdrawal”) through a cycle of addictive behaviors.; The dissertation also examines how attitudes and thinking about drugs are shaped among Bogotá adolescents. Focusing on the category of “droga” (drugs), interview data demonstrate how adolescents' ideas of “droga” are influenced by their everyday embodied interactions with these substances and by cultural ideas such as “vicio” (vice). Cultural models of “social distance from drugs,” the “risks of use,” and “drugs as morally wrong” comprise the negative cultural evaluations of drugs in Bogotá. Coupled with the context of high costs and stigmatization of substance use, these models help to account for why adolescents avoid drug use. A final cultural model on “limits to use” helps adolescents to regulate their use of legal and illegal drugs, especially in the context of peer and family networks. |
