  Treatments of plasma waves usually assume homogeneity, but the parallel
gradients ubiquitous in plasmas can modify wave propagation and absorption. We
derive a quasilocal inhomogeneous correction to the plasma dielectric for
arbitrary distributions by expanding the phase correlation integral and develop
a novel integration technique that allows our correction to be applied in many
situations and has greater accuracy than other inhomogeneous dielectric
formulas found in the literature. We apply this dielectric tensor to the
lower-hybrid current drive problem and demonstrate that inhomogeneous wave
damping does not affect the lower-hybrid wave's linear damping condition, and
in the non-Maxwellian problem damping and propagation should remain unchanged
except in the case of waves with very large phase velocities.
