s, thus making them more vulnerable to peer pressure that may include a tendency toward alcohol or drug abuse. A similar point is made by Rogan (1986), who says that for both blacks and Native Americans, the individuals experience of the culture, not personal characteristics (or indeed the physical vicissitudes of alcohol abuse per se), is the decisive factor in both use of alcohol and treatment for alcohol abuse. In a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, Rogan makes the case that the question of race and the experience of ethnic "difference" within the context of a white-dominant culture can lead to alcoholism. Alcohol use, on this view, is a response to the fact of being a member of an ethnic minority in a mainstream culture.
The negative effects of excessive alcohol consumption across demographic groups have been well-documented. Ormond (1992) notes that substance abuse in general, imprisonment, and crime, have become a way of life for inner-city residents and that one of the challenges of reintegrating African American prison inmates into the general population is interrupting negative patterns of substance-related behavior in meaningful ways. According to Ormond, the levels of depression and anxiety among African American males in such a context can be traced to illiteracy, lack of vocational opportunities, and a general lack of social skills that are not related to substance-abuse behavior. There is also some evidence that the effects of alcohol and other substance abuse are amplified among African Americans, whether in or out of the prison population. According to Grisso and others (1994), one of the major risk factors for increased likelihood of broken hips among black women over the age of 45 is use of alcohol. Specifically, women in that group who consumed more than seven drinks of alcohol per week were almost five times more likely to be subject to injuries to their hip than their nondrinking coun...