Editorial
I am delighted to present to you an ethnically and culturally diverse range of articles, all relevant to substance use, misuse and abuse trajectories, and engagement in innovative treatment modalities. Surendra K. Mattoo and colleagues present interesting findings in their article on Indian substance users, their family members' perceptions of stigma toward substance use, and the interplay of family support and willingness to engage in substance disorder treatment pathways. Findings illustrate how stigma is perceived similarly by substance dependent patients and their family members in India, and how successful and appropriate methods of stigma reduction are likely from what works in the West, given a low literacy rate and different approaches to law enforcement. In the next article, W. Scott Comulada and colleagues report on compliance to cell phone based ecological momentary assessment (CEMA) among Latino youth in outpatient treatment, which indicates that CEMA can potentially overcome retrospective self report biases when monitoring drug use in adolescent substance users, and presents a viable monitoring tool. This research provides an important proof of concept for the administration of text message based CEMA in adolescent outpatient settings, given its encouraging findings relating to compliance and its potential for use in all forms of patient mobile phones. Sarah Herbert and Christine Stephens investigated alcohol use, hazardous and binge drinking prevalence, and their relationships to socio demographic variables in community dwelling older Maori adults in New Zealand using the AUDIT C, with reported high rates of hazardous and binge drinking prevalence presenting a concern with regard to the health of older Maori people. Results indicate that social networks, gender, smoking status, and cultural identification potentially influence the social patterning of hazardous and binge drinking alcohol use among older Maori, warranting further investigation. Silvia L. Acosta and colleagues examined whether discrimination experienced by Hispanic Latino adolescents was directly associated with adolescent alcohol use or indirectly associated with adolescent alcohol use via mediation by ethnic identity and or peer associations. Perceived discrimination was indirectly related to alcohol consumption through positive (nondrinking) peer affiliations. Ethnic identity was found to moderate the relationship between discrimination and positive peer affiliation. The findings contribute Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, 14:221 222, 2015 Copyright Taylor Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1533 2640 print=1533 2659 online DOI: 10.1080/15332640.2015.1071563