, 1969) identify early childhood as the pivotal developmental period. What is most important about Erikson's stage theory, however, is that it has as much to do with environment and culture as with idiosyncratic ego psychology per se. That fact is adopted by Goodnow, Miller, and Kessel (1995, p. 2) in their description of human-development psychology as providing "a unified view of development and culture as intertwined processes." In Shweder's formulation, the culture provides a venue for human cognition, learning, and selfhood but also interacts with them: "you can't take the stuff out of the psyche and you can't take the psyche out of the stuff" (Shweder, 1990, p. 22).
Sometimes the "stuff" is pathological and self-destructive to the psyche. Drug abuse is an example of an intersection point between culture and individual. It is associated both with individual behavior and with profoundly influential cultural cues. It can exert far-reaching influence on the psyche's development and well-being, even though individuals may deliberately engage in drug use and even though they may be aware of the potentially destructive effects of drugs. In the contemporary anti-drug environment, the so-called war on drugs positions drug dealers and users among the youth demographic, particularly impoverished minority youth. The popular conception that drug crime is a "black" or "brown" problem tends to encourage "vibrant support for increasingly punitive sentencing policies and program reductions inside of prisons" (Clarke, 1998).
However, there is compelling evidence that the drug culture is not confined to the impoverished minority underclass: "Patients with substance abuse problems are common in general medical practice and include people of all ages and socioeconomic groups" (Weaver, et al., 1999, p. 913). Primary-care doctors are often called upon to refer patients to substance-abuse treatment. Typically, these are young adults, whom Erikson (...