This text describes the communicative and relational features of adolescent drug use. It is written for people who care about adolescents and are concerned about their drug use problems: researchers, practitioners, parents and teachers, among others. It informs the reader about how drugs, adolescents and the social world (a world of peer pressure, emerging and fragile self-identity, need for approval, desire to be accepted, cliques, identification with peers and peer norms) affect an adolescent’s relationship with his/her parents. Although other scholars have focused on the properties of drugs, peer norms, risk and protective factors, the work represented in this book extends this focus to include a look at how drugs are offered to adolescents - who makes these offers and how they are resisted; where the offers take place and the relationship between the persons making the offers and the persons receiving them. This book first describes the social and relational processes of drug resistance and then links intervention techniques to the adolescents’ relational world. Major contributions of this book include: placing drug use and resistance in a living, relational context; providing the first comprehensive communication and relational approach to drug resistance; offering the first detailed analysis of drug resistance which considers the relationship between offerer and resister, different types of drugs, the languages used by adolescents, family and peer group relationships, personality and situations; arguing for a relational and communication competence model of drug resistance; and suggesting a unique relational and communication approach to drug prevention using video and live performance to present resistance models created from teens’ own words. By placing the management of drug issues in a relational and developmental framework, it: informs relationship, communication and psychology researchers by extending their theories; assists drug and health researchers by presenting them with a new way of looking at the topic; and enlightens practitioners by demonstrating a new approach to prevention, and informs parents by helping them understand their children.
