The legal model is not oriented toward a detailed analysis of drug addiction and much less of its causal factors. His interest, on the contrary, is to underline personal responsibility in the criminal act and the responsibility of coercive Intervention of the judicial system, which must respond through legal sanction to guarantee, as far as possible, public health and collective security. From this model, drugs are perceived as dangerous and capable –in certain circumstances and at the hands of certain people– of creating risky situations that endanger the physical integrity of individuals and collective health.
According to this model, all non-institutionalized drug-related activity becomes at least antisocial behavior, if not explicitly illegal. The individual involved will respond to the judicial system, which is prepared for this purpose, and will do so based on the seriousness of his offense and the consequences derived from it. The social context may play a modulating role in the crime or anti-regulatory act, mitigating or aggravating its consequences and responsibility. However, the legal model only affects the detailed analysis of the interactions and influences between the person and the drug or between the person, the drug, and the environment.
The Model Of Social Deprivation
The transgressive social meaning and the anxiolytic and liberating psychoactive experience of bodily and psychological gratifications can explain the drug-deprivation relationship.
The living conditions of individuals involve economic, labor, and material aspects, as well as value priorities, group norms, and relational properties of the environment. But they also involve the opportunities to obtain gratification in social life and the possibility of satisfying basic rights. For all these reasons, opportunities are socially conditioned by the objective social structure (Cockerham, Abel, and Lüschen, 1993).
From this interpretative perspective, measures are proposed to reduce or eliminate environmental factors that may favor the abusive consumption of substances or drug addiction. This would imply the reduction of social and economic tensions, the conditions that cause frustration and lack of opportunities for individuals and groups, and the promotion of conditions that facilitate equality and social well-being for all social sectors.
This model reduces the problem of drugs to an essentially economic causality, and the same economic perspective restricts it to a poverty-drug relationship while stigmatizing the most depressed classes as drug users (Ramírez, 1991). On the contrary, it has been verified in Spain that the consumption of substances does not have a higher incidence in neighboring communities with more economic problems (Pons, Pinazo and Carreras, 2002), as well as that among adolescents, the consumption of alcoholic beverages increases in groups with a high purchasing power (Pons and Berjano, 1999). Using Mexican samples of the urban population, it has recently been found that alcohol consumption and extra-medical consumption of anxiolytic drugs are lower in people with a low socio-educational level.
The Health Education Model
From this perspective, drug use is seen as a problem that affects people’s physical, mental, and relational health, and that can be reduced through educational procedures. Green (1984) explains that health education is the discipline responsible for transmitting knowledge about specific behaviors that pose a health risk and about others that, on the contrary, promote and protect health.
This approach coincides with the traditional medical model in the trust placed on transmitting information to society to reduce the incidence of substance use. However, it emphasizes the educational and communicative aspects of this information transmission process and does not propose a simple disclosure of information. It is also a more interventional approach than descriptive or conceptualizing and more oriented towards comprehensive health than pathology.
Educational And Informational Interventions Are Directed At Four Areas:
- The educational environment itself. In educational centers for children and adolescents, the teachers are responsible for educating students about health protection.
- The media field. It refers to campaigns in the mass media aimed at highlighting the risks associated with substance use.
- The community sphere. It includes actions in social and community services, information points, and programs with street workers or youth centers, among others.
- The health field. Health centers’ responsibility for transmitting knowledge on this subject corresponds to the doctor.
As noted above, special interest is placed in the persuasive capacity of the educational or communicative message, in the communicative and pedagogical methodology used, and, in general, in the quality of the information transmission process aimed at modifying people’s behavioral intentions.…