Geography and Drug Addiction

Geography and Drug Addiction

Yonette F. Thomas 

Douglas Richardson 

 

Ivan Cheung

Editors

Foreword by Douglas Richardson

Springer

2008

Foreword

Making Connections:

Geography and Drug Addiction

  Geography involves making connections – connections in our world among people and places, cultures, human activities, and natural processes. It involves understanding the relationships and ‘connections’ between seemingly disparate or unrelated ideas and between what is and what might be.

   Geography also involves connecting with people. When I first encountered an extraordinarily vibrant, intelligent, and socially engaged scientist at a private dinner several years ago, I was immediately captivated by the intensity of her passion to understand how and why people become addicted to drugs, and what could be done to treat or prevent drug addiction. Fortunately, she was willing to think beyond the bounds of her own discipline in her search for answers. Our conversation that evening, which began with her research on fundamental biochemical processes of drug addiction in the human body, evolved inevitably to an exploration of the ways in which research on the geographical context of drug addiction might contribute to the better understanding of etiology of addiction, its diffusion, its interaction with geographically variable environmental, social, and economic factors, and the strategies for its treatment and prevention.

  This fascinating woman, I soon learned, was Nora Volkow, the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse as well as the granddaughter of Leon Trotsky. Our chance encounter that evening led to further wide-ranging discussions during several subsequent months on the interactions between geography and drug addiction, resulting ultimately in an agreement between the Association of American Geographers and the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to jointly sponsor a special symposium on research topics related to geography and drug addiction.

  This special AAG/NIDA Symposium eventually took place in March 8, 2006 in conjunction with the 2006 Annual Meeting of the AAG in Chicago, Illinois. We invited interested geographers, neuroscientists, GIScientists, medical researchers, epidemiologists, geneticists, and others with expertise in geographical dimensions of drug addiction and abuse to apply to participate in the symposium. Themes addressed included:

- Spatial patterns of drug use and addiction 

- Linking spatial models with neuroscience and genetics in drug abuse research 

- Interaction of social and environmental factors with biochemical processes of addiction 

- Geographic analysis linking demographic and genetic characteristics related to drug addiction and treatment

- Locational analyses of drug addiction treatment and service delivery facilities

- Neighborhood scale studies of geographic factors (including the built environment) and their interaction with drug addiction, treatment, or prevention

- Use of Geographic Information Systems to better understand and respond to drug addiction 

- Spatial diffusion modeling of addictive drug usage and its changing characteristics, including predictive modeling 

- Interaction of other spatially dependent variables with drug addiction, or with prevention and treatment strategies 

- Other geographic research relevant to better understanding the etiology of drug use and addiction 

   Attendance at the Geography and Drug Abuse Symposium was open to all and generated wide-ranging discussion and many new ideas for research and collaboration. Results of the symposium and subsequent conversations among the participants appear in this book, which we hope will help guide the development of future research agendas within geography and GIScience, and within NIDA and more broadly at NIH.

   There has not been a great deal of past research on the connections between geography and drug addiction. Thus, it is important to note that the purpose of this book is to explore the relatively new terrain of an embryonic field of research. As such, this book represents an initial attempt to identify research ideas, connections, and research pathways which point to some promising avenues for future work in this area.

   It is our hope that our initial explorations of research pathways and agendas in this book will generate far greater interest in and significant funding for this important new field. If we are successful in this goal, we look forward to publishing subsequent volumes reporting on what we believe will soon be a rapidly growing and mature field of research, essential to understanding and treating drug addiction. I would like to thank our publisher, Springer, whose editors were quick to appreciate the significance of this new field of research and encouraged our early efforts by publishing not only this first volume exploring these linkages and research needs, but by also by initiating a new series of books on this theme, with this book as the initial volume in the series.

  We also hope that the ‘connections’ forged between the topics of geography and drug addiction – and between the AAG and NIDA – will provide geographic context and analysis to support NIH’s ongoing efforts to understand the complex processes of drug addiction. I believe this book and these connections have the potential to create an extraordinarily fertile new field for geographic research, one which has significant potential for real-world benefit through better understanding and treatment of the scourge which is drug addiction.

  I would like to thank Nora Volkow, who helped ‘brainstorm’ this collaborative process and who delivered the symposium’s keynote address, and our distinguished NIDA colleagues Yonette Thomas and Wilson Compton for their sustained support and friendship, as well as the many colleagues and contributors from the worlds of geography and medical sciences who made the symposium and this book possible.

Douglas Richardson

Executive Director

Association of American Geographers

Contents

Part I Integrating Geography in Drug Abuse Research

1 Placing Substance Abuse ........................................ 1

Sara McLafferty

2 Integrating Geography and Social Epidemiology in Drug Abuse

Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Yonette Thomas, Douglas Richardson and Ivan Cheung

Part II Geo-epidemiology in Drug Abuse Research

3 Integrating GIS into the Study of Contextual Factors Affecting

Injection Drug Use Along the Mexico/US Border . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Kimberly C. Brouwer, John R. Weeks, Remedios Lozada and Steffanie

A. Strathdee

4 The Spatial Context of Adolescent Alcohol Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Karen A. Snedker, Jerald R. Herting

5 Migration Patterns and Substance Use among Young Homeless

Travelers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Stephen E. Lankenau, Bill Sanders, Jennifer Jackson Bloom, Dodi

Hathazi, Erica Alarcon, Stephanie Tortu and Michael C. Clatts

6 Residential Mobility and Drug Use Among Parolees in San Diego,

California and Implications for Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Meagan Cahill and Nancy LaVigne

7 Social Disorganization, Alcohol, and Drug Markets and Violence . . . . 117

Aniruddha Banerjee, Elizabeth LaScala, Paul J. Gruenewald, Bridget

Freisthler, Andrew Treno and Lillian G. Remer

8 Integrated Assessment of Addiction Epidemiology in Hong Kong, 1996–2005 . . . . . . 131

Shui Shan Lee and Phoebe TT Pang

9 Residential Segregation and the Prevalence of Injection Drug Use among Black Adult Residents of US Metropolitan Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

Hannah L.F Cooper, Samuel R. Friedman, Barbara Tempalski and Risa Friedman

10 The Relationship of Ecological Containment and Heroin Practices . . . 159

Avelardo Valdez and Alice Cepeda

11 Comparing Unintentional Opioid Poisoning Mortality in Metropolitan and Non-Metropolitan Counties, United States, 1999–2003 . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Nabarun Dasgupta, Michele Jonsson Funk and John S. Brownstein ¨

12 Spatial Patterns of Clandestine Methamphetamine Labs inColorado Springs, Colorado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Max Lu and Jessica Burnum

13 A Therapeutic Landscape? Contextualizing Methamphetamine in

North Dakota . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Kevin Romig and Alex Feidler

14 Are Spatial Variables Important? The Case of Markets for Multiple Drugs in British Bengal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

Siddharth Chandra and Aaron Swoboda

Part III Geography of Injection Drug Users and HIV

15 Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Infection Rates and Heroin

Trafficking: Fearful Symmetries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

Chris Beyrer

16 Metropolitan Area Characteristics, Injection Drug Use and HIV

Among Injectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

Samuel R. Friedman, Barbara Tempalski, Hannah Cooper, Spencer Lieb, Joanne Brady, Peter L. Flom, Risa Friedman, Karla Gostnell and Don C Des Jarlais

17 Factors Influencing Drug Use and HIV Risk in Two Nicaraguan

Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

Michele G. Shedlin, Rita Arauz, Pascual Ortells, Mariana Aburto and Danilo Norori

18 Drug Use and HIV/AIDS: Risk Environments

in Post-Soviet Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

Dominique Moran

19 Substance Abuse and HIV in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

Xiushi Yang

Part IV Geographic Dimensions of Drug Treatment and Prevention

20 Placing the Dynamics of Syringe Exchange Programs in the United States . . . . . .  . 319

Barbara Tempalski

21 The effect of individual, program, and neighborhood variables on continuity of treatment among dually diagnosed individuals . . . . . . . . 337

Gerald J. Stahler, Silvana Mazzella, Jeremy Mennis, Sanjoy Chakravorty, George Rengert and Ralph Spiga

22 Exploring the Reciprocal Effects of Substance Abuse Treatment Provision and Area Substance Abuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353

Matthew E. Archibald

23 Using a GIS Framework to Assess Hurricane Recovery Needs of Substance Abuse Center Clients in Katrina- and Rita-Affected Areas 369

Traci Craig Green and Cynthia Pope

24 Using GIS to Identify Drug Markets and Reduce Drug-Related Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395

Eleazer D. Hunt, Marty Sumner, Thomas J. Scholten and James M. Frabutt

Part V Emerging Research Directions

25 Modeling the Spatial Patterns of Substance and Drug Abuse in the US . . . . . . . . . . . . 415

Sucharita Gopal, Matt Adams, Mark Vanelli

26 Reconceptualizing Sociogeographic Context for the Study of Drug Use, Abuse, and Addiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437

Mei-Po Kwan, Ruth D. Peterson, Christopher R. Browning, Lori A. Burrington, Catherine A. Calder and Lauren J. Krivo

27 Spatial Analytic Approaches to Explaining the Trends and Patterns of Drug Overdose Deaths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447

Charlie DiMaggio, Angela Bucciarelli, Kenneth J. Tardiff, David Vlahov and Sandro Galea

References

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521

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