Desire for Help Among African-American Drug Users

The authors examined demographic factors, drug-problem severity indicators, and social and personal resources of African-American drug users as correlates of their self-reported desire for help with problems related to drug use. Avoiding the ethnic gloss of earlier research, the authors included ethnicity-related attitudes, perceptions, and experiences among the factors tested. Findings suggested that interpersonal problem recognition was a key determinant of desire for help in this sample. Two additional factors associated with desire for help in multivariate analysis were conventional moral beliefs and expected benefit of drug treatment. The authors cite implications of these findings for patterns of help-seeking and recovery among treatment-naive African-American drug users.