Adolescent Drug Abuse in Hong Kong: Prevalence, Psychosocial Correlates, and Prevention.

Purpose: Hong Kong has devised strategies to tackle the problem of psychoactive drug abuse in adolescents since the mid-1990s. This paper sought to find out whether previous research and prevention work has made use of concepts and ideas that are akin to the Positive Youth Development (PYD) approach. The prospect of adopting PYD in Hong Kong's drug prevention system was explored.

Bring the subjective back in: resource and husband-to-wife physical assault among Chinese couples in Hong Kong.

Resource theory constitutes important explanations of spousal violence in culturally diverse societies. This article extends the theory by adding several subjective indicators: husband's financial strain and the couple's appraisal of each other's financial and nonfinancial contributions to family. We examined the role of these subjective dimensions of resource in spousal violence against the backdrop of other predictors, including the husband's absolute socioeconomic resources, the wife's economic dependence, and relative resource differences between the husband and wife.

To use or not to use: an update on licit and illicit ketamine use.

Ketamine, a derivative of phencyclidine that was developed in the 1960s, is an anesthetic and analgesic with hallucinogenic effects. In this paper, the pharmacological and toxicological effects of ketamine are briefly reviewed. Ketamine possesses a wide safety margin but such a therapeutic benefit is somewhat offset by its emergence phenomenon (mind-body dissociation and delirium) and hallucinogenic effects.

Gender and HIV risk behavior among intravenous drug users in Sichuan Province, China.

Using data from a community-based study of injection drug users (IDUs) in Sichuan Province in China, this study compared the level of HIV risk behavior (needle sharing and unsafe sex) amongst female and male IDUs, and examined the risk factors separately for these two groups. Five risk factors were examined in the analysis, including a lack of family support, having an IDU primary sex partner, economic pressure, lack of access to a methadone program, and younger age. Regression results showed that male and female IDUs had different risk factors.