Drug Intervention
Drug use behavior appears, from this perspective, as the product of a complex field of forces. The socio-ecological model aims to revalue the human being as a social and cultural being. It addresses the drug problem as a multidimensional phenomenon, making it possible to search for and discover new intervention alternatives that allow it to be reduced and controlled by attacking its causes at different levels of depth. In this sense, drug use is resized as a social problem.
Intervention
In
Addiction
The Intervention is directed toward the problem’s causes and not only the symptoms.
The Intervention is conceptualized from primary prevention, understood as a scientific attempt to know the factors that make a social problem possible –risk factors– and try to reduce its probability of appearance.
That is, primary prevention is seen as an anticipatory action against risk factors to reduce their appearance and, in this way, lessen the incidence of maladjusted behavior.
Preventive Actions Will Have The Following Characteristics
The subjects' socializing experiences are considered force vectors that condition their social behavior. It will try to intervene on these vectors rather than on the behavioral intentions of the potential drug user.
Preventive interventions start from childhood since the concept of primary prevention becomes unspecific, oriented to the integral development of the individual and not only to the avoidance of a specific behavior.
In this methodological and theoretical context, intervention actions have been proposed in the social and educational fields, among which we highlight the following as a representative sample of the proposals offered by the socio-ecological perspective.
Alcohol Consumption
Action is taken on the risk factor, trying to find it in the greatest possible degrees of depth.
Thus, if, for example, research determines that certain personality traits increase the probability of early consumption in a minor or the development of addictive behavior in an adult, it will be necessary to find out what environmental conditions operate, in turn, as etiological antecedents of these traits –family socialization experiences from childhood, etc.–, to intervene on them to guide them in the right direction.
This type of action has as a common denominator the search for the cause rather than the direct Intervention on the behavioral intention:
- Provide parents with the necessary resources and skills so that the socialization strategies they submit to their children are oriented towards promoting protective factors and avoiding risk factors. A representative work model is that of the schools for fathers and mothers, an educational instance where parents with small children learn strategies based on behavioral sciences and education to acquire sufficient skills and resources to educate their children (Pinazo, 1993).
- Propose to society as a whole a critical analysis –albeit slow, objective, and non-moralizing– of the uses and customs that legitimize the consumption of institutionalized substances. Human behavior is not immune to the influences of macro social factors that define a society’s historical, political, and ethnographic characteristics. Individual decisions, micro-social influences, and these other wide-ranging factors inform everyday behaviors. For this reason, broad knowledge about the conditions that lead to an uncritical attitude towards commonly used drugs cannot be neglected, which, on the other hand, are the ones that facilitate learning in substance use (Melero, 1993).