Three University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu psychology and sociology faculty members authored a research article recently published in an international journal and included in the world’s largest medical library.
UH West O‘ahu’s Dr. Mark Hanson, professor of Psychology; Dr. Konstantinos Zougris, associate professor of Sociology; and Dr. Orlando Garcia-Santiago, professor of Sociology, published a peer-reviewed research article titled, “Contextualizing drug use and pharmacological harm in the United States: a socio-historical overview.”
Their article was published in June by the Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, an international journal that focuses on the ethnicity and cultural variations in alcohol, tobacco, and substance use and abuse, and on substance and drug abusers of various ethnic groups.
Additionally, the article was recently included in the National Center for Biotechnology Information with the National Library of Medicine — the world’s largest biomedical library and a leader in research in computational health informatics — at the National Institutes of Health.
“Briefly, our article navigates through the socio-historical modulations in American tolerance for different psychoactive substances from the theoretical lens of two vanguard philosophical doctrines: objectivism and constructivism,” Zougris said. “We employed a socio-historical approach examining the objective harms that have influenced drug use tolerance in the United States.”
The synthesis developed in their socio-historic analysis has application for sensitizing drug policy makers about the implicit cultural biases that play a role, alongside information about objective pharmacological harms, in establishing psychoactive drug policy, he said.
Zougris elaborated on the signficance of the study, noting that it contributes to the body of literature examining the major drug concerns in the United States over time.
“We suggested a groundbreaking sequential meta-theoretical synthesis consisting of the constructionist and objectivist perspectives to examine the socio-historical context of drug use and pharmacological harm in the United States,” Zougris said.
He continued, “Our proposed theoretical framework aims to serve as the conceptual foundation of further empirical studies examining the phenomenon of drug use and pharmacological harm in the context of the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States.”
If interested in accessing the full article, please contact Dr. Konstantinos Zougris at kzougris@hawaii.edu.