Asian American Identity and Drug Consumption: From Acculturation to Normalization

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the relationship between substance use and ethnic identity in the narratives of 206 young Asian Americans in a dance club/rave scene. We examined the meaning of drug use and found three types of narratives invoked to explain their drug use. The first noted difficulties arising from their Asian American identities, the experience of culture clash, and stresses associated with acculturation and Americanization. The second viewed their drug consumption as unusual among Asian Americans and saw their drug use as indicative of the degree to which they have grown apart from Asian culture and toward white/American culture. The final group saw their identities as Asian Americans neither as drug users nor as Asian American drug users as problematic. Drug use was a normal, accepted, and mundane part of their leisure time, not something they viewed as problematic or unusual.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American youth
• drug use
• ethnic identity
• ethnicity
• normalization and acculturation

Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01-DA14317).

Notes

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∗p < .05.

For a few key texts on Asian American youth, see Danico, 2004; Kibria, 2002; Lee, 1996; Lee & Zhou, 2004; Maira, 2002; and Min, 2002.

Currently, the majority of Asian Americans (approximately 60%) are foreign-born or “first-generation” immigrants, over one-quarter are the children of immigrants (the “second generation”), and approximately 10% are third-generation or beyond (Zhou, 1997).

For analysis and critique of acculturation perspectives see Alba and Nee, 2003; Kivisto, 2005. Assimilation theorists have developed more sophisticated models over the years, for example Portes and Zhou's (1993) segmented assimilation approach. However, even these more sophisticated models do not escape all of the problems identified by assimilation theory's critics, discussed in the next section.

The qualitative analysis for this article is taken from analysis of a smaller number (100) of the 206 respondents discussed above.

Shiner and Newburn (1999) use this data to argue against the normalization thesis, demonstrating that in neither the United States nor in Great Britain has illicit drug use become a majority activity. We agree with them about the dangers of exaggerating these claims. However, they do point out that drug use is on the rise among youth in both countries and additionally point to the importance of not focusing just on prevalence statistics but also on the attitudes of the youth themselves. It is to the latter type of analysis that we are confining our comments about normalization. Our sampling frame explicitly excluded non-drug users, so we are making no claims about overall trends in drug use among Asian Americans. Instead, we will examine attitudes about and perceptions of normalization among this sample of drug-experienced Asian Americans (most of whom do not think they differ much from Asian American youth at large).

This idea of alcohol being particularly dominant in the Indian community was commonly mentioned in the interviews, and in our quantitative analysis we found that 100% of our South Asian respondents were current users of hard alcohol (whereas the range was from 70% to 79% for all other ethnic groups).