Abstract
This article describes the debates leading to Puerto Rico’s Mental Health Law of 2000, which defined addiction as a spiritual and social problem rather than a mental disorder, in order to trace three competing approaches to addiction in Puerto Rico: evangelist, biomedical, and harm-reductionist. Highlighting the ways in which the evangelist approach of Puerto Rican street ministries challenges the individualism underlying US faith-based initiatives and the punitive approach of the US War on Drugs, this article concludes that the virtues of the evangelist approach to addiction would be best supported by public funding for biomedical and harm-reduction approaches within a pluralistic system of treatment for addiction.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by MSTP US NIH Training Grant GM07205, the Social Science Research Council Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University’s John Perry Miller Fund, and Yale’s Council on Latin American Studies. I would like to thank Dr Carmen Albizu, Dr Salvador Santiago, Dr Ann Finlinson, Dr Irene Melendez, Nancy Martinez, Dr Sara Huertas, and the directors and staff of Escuela Biblica Nueva Fé and Misión de Salvación for making this study possible, as well as Dr Robert Levine, Dr Julie Rosenbaum, Professor Linda-Anne Rebhun, Professor Patricia Pessar, Professor Philippe Bourgois, Professor Renee Fox, Professor Kathryn Dudley, Drs. Jennifer Tilton, Ping-Ann Addo, and Gilbert Mireles for their helpful comments on early drafts
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Hansen, H. Isla Evangelista—A Story of Church and State: Puerto Rico’s Faith-Based Initiatives in Drug Treatment. Cult Med Psychiatry 29, 433–456 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-006-9002-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-006-9002-6