Trajectories of Long-Term Mexican American Heroin Injectors: The "Maturing Out" Paradox.

Elderly Hispanics in the United States represent one of the fastest growing cohorts of aging Americans. Using a life course drug use framework, this manuscript examines the applicability of the "maturing out" theory to a sample of ageing Mexican American long-term heroin injectors. The paper explores the trajectory of these men's heroin career phases that range from initiation to maintenance, yet paradoxically never reaching a maturing out phase. We examine the influence and relationships of family, peers, and community in creating a stable and supportive environment that contributes to these men's life course experience in maintaining their use. The findings of our qualitative study join a number of studies that challenge a simple linear conception of the maturing out hypothesis that as heroin addicts age the dysfunctions, stresses and strains of the heroin lifestyle become too much to manage for leading to an eventual cessation of heroin use. Rather our data support a more complex view of maturing out. In paradoxical maturing out, the dysfunctions that emerge in the heroin lifestyle lead not to cessation, but rather to a "maturing in" by which a specific process of social readjustment takes place that returns the heroin user to a stable maintenance pattern of use. This process of paradoxical maturing out can be attributed to the unconditional social support provided by the Mexican American heroin user by family, peers and the tecato subculture embedded in Mexican American communities in the Southwest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]