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Drug scares have historically been created for a range of purposes and with a variety of effects in the United States. Moral panics evoked by these drug scares either support or challenge dominant American ideas about race, economics, and society. In the present study, we examined newspaper accounts of methamphetamine use in the Inland Pacific Northwest of the United States in an effort to understand how the "reality" of the "meth epidemic" is socially constructed in a "meth hotspot," and reflect upon the ways that the discourse of Whiteness intersects with this construction. For our analysis, we are cognizant of the "slipperiness" of the logic of Whiteness as a concept, and the ways that an alternative logic is articulated - one that strategically embraces or distances White drug users to support notions of White dominance. We focus on the possibility that individual meth users could then be portrayed pseudo-racially as "White trash," and thus rendered outside the logic of White racial order. Our findings center on two main themes: (1) the use of fear in the construction of the meth drug scare through the sensationalization of meth, its anthropomorphization, and the depiction of the threat of the White drug user; and (2) how the logic of Whiteness is discursively reconciled within this construction. Given current mediated discourses about drug use and health in the United States that center on the emergence of the White drug user as the face of the opioid crisis, we are well served to carefully consider the recent historical precedence of the "meth epidemic" in which the public was faced with reconciling their views about drug use and the intersection of race, class, and mainstream American identity.

Public health efforts focused on Latina youth sexuality are most commonly framed by the syndemic of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, a narrow and often heteronormative focus that perpetuates silences that contribute to health inequities and overlooks the growing need for increased education, awareness, and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth. This article presents findings from the project Let's Talk About Sex: Digital Storytelling for Puerto Rican Latina Youth, which used a culturally centered, narrative-based approach for analyzing participants' own specifications of sexual values and practices. The strength of digital storytelling lies in its utility as an innovative tool for community-based and culturally situated research, as well as in its capacity to open up new spaces for health communication. Here we present two "coming out" case studies to illustrate the value of digital storytelling in supporting the development of meaningful and culturally relevant health promotion efforts for LGBTQ-identified Puerto Rican Latina youth across the life span.

Influenced by Cooke and Kothari's (2001) suggestion that participation "remains a way of talking about rather than doing things" (p. 32), we question to what extent this is true in the public health funding process. Thus, the aim of this article was to investigate the ways in which recent National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded community-based participatory research (CBPR) projects discursively positioned CBPR in their grant applications. We collected 17 NIH-funded CBPR proposals, analyzed them using a grounded theory approach, and subjected the findings to critical analysis focusing on the definition of community, the type of community "participation" promoted, and the nature of the research proposed. We conclude that certain types of CBPR projects are privileged in the funding review process and discuss the implications of these findings for future CBPR praxis.