IU TO CONDUCT $3 MILLION STUDY ON HISPANIC DRUG ABUSE

As the nation's population becomes more diverse, so should its efforts
to stop drug use, experts say.

A new, almost $3 million Florida International University research
project is expected to help. By studying drug use and lack of it among
Hispanic groups, the project aims toward making anti-drug programs
more effective for Hispanics -- and drawing on Hispanics' experience
to make such efforts more effective for everyone.

For instance, FIU's new Latino Drug Abuse Research Center will look at
mother-daughter relationships to explore why Hispanic women exhibit
lower rates of drug use than non-Hispanic women, as federal studies
have found. Ultimately, the answers could help strengthen drug-
prevention programs for Hispanics and non-Hispanics alike, says
research center director Mario De La Rosa.

The research center also will study correlations between drugs and
violence in various Hispanic groups, he said.

"As we learn more about the nature of drug use, we're finding that
it's just much more complex than we realized," said Lucinda Miner, an
administrator at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a federal
agency that agreed this spring to put up $2.8 million for the FIU
project. "We've really been making a concerted effort to address a lot
of the disparities in [our research] on ethnic groups -- in what's
known about them and how we can help those groups."

FIU is looking for research assistants and others to work on the five-
year project, De La Rosa said.

Researchers around the country have examined elements of drug and
alcohol use among Hispanics since the 1970s. One University of Texas
researcher has counted more than 160 such studies, on such diverse
topics as links between drinking and the severity of highway injuries
in Mexico and comparisons of HIV risks among black, Mexican-American
and Puerto Rican drug users. One, published in an anthropology journal
in 1975, pinpointed "the role of the drunk in a Oaxacan village."

While federal studies have noted differences in the prevalence of drug
use among different Hispanic groups, "drug use among the Latino sub-
populations is very unexplored," Miner said. "Not many groups can do
that, but Florida International University, with the diversity among
their Latino scholars, is in a position to do that."

The FIU project also plans to distinguish itself by centering on
Hispanic groups prevalent in South Florida but relatively rarely
spotlighted in previous research, including Cubans and South
Americans, De La Rosa said.

Hispanics are the nation's largest racial or ethnic minority,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The agency estimates the national
Hispanic population at 39 million, or more than 13 percent of
Americans. The number of Hispanics is growing almost four times as
fast as the population as a whole.

The 2000 Census counted more than 2.6 million Hispanics in Florida,
almost two-thirds of them living in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach
counties.

Last year's Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey found Hispanic
students were less likely than white students, but more likely than
black students, to have taken illegal drugs. The survey was
administered to 63,000 students statewide in sixth through 12th grades.

Local anti-drug organizations have gauged the prevalence and
perception of drug use in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, but they
haven't delved much into the questions of cause, effect and ethnicity
that the FIU project proposes to examine. They welcome it as a
potential tool for refining their services.

"We used to do universal, 'just say no' type of things," says David
Choate, who runs the United Way of Broward County's Commission on
Substance Abuse. "[Drug-abuse prevention] really has to be targeted
now because there really are so many ethnic and cultural differences."
In the drug-abuse prevention programs run by the West Palm Beach-based
Partnership for a Drug-Free Community in South Florida, "we do have a
lot of similarities -- kids are kids. [But] a lot of the parents are
different," said executive director Doris Carroll. Understanding a
family's cultural background can make the agency's efforts more
effective, she said.

Still, to Hispanic advocates, such research can tread a line between
sensitivity and stereotyping.

"Are there problems with drugs in the [Hispanic] community? Yes, like
there are problems with drugs in other communities," said Lisa
Navarrete, a spokeswoman for the National Council of La Raza, a
prominent Hispanic organization that commissioned its own research on
drug use in 1990.

"We should document the problem with an eye to what we need to do ...
[and] we hope and expect that that's the purpose of studies, rather
than finding ways to further stigmatize the community," she said.

FIU's De La Rosa says his research will aim for the universal, as well
as the unique.

The goal, he says, "is to see how the information that you can get
from one group can be utilized to help that group and also utilized to
help other groups -- to see what really works for everybody, and
what's different."