Argumentative Essay on Drug Abuse Problem: The Social Construction is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Argumentative Essay on Drug Abuse Problem: The Social Construction at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

A measure of independence exists between the subjective and the objective as it does for all other conditions that cause harm and damage to the society. For instance, given the nearly 600,000 deaths caused by the use of alcohol and tobacco compared with the 20,000 or 30,000 deaths caused by illicit drug use, why does the latter generate so much more concern than the former? Considering solely the objective harm caused by a given condition--using death as one measure of harm--why should the less serious problem generate more public concern and dread?

The answer to this question does not stem solely from irrational factors. Some of them seem entirely reasonable. For one thing, on a dose-for-dose basis, several of the illicit drugs (most notably, heroin, and to a lesser extent, PCP, cocaine, and methamphetamine) are more damaging and dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes. A single episode of heroin use is vastly more likely to kill the user than a single episode of alcohol consumption and, even more emphatically, a single episode of cigarette consumption. Second, heroin and cocaine tend to kill earlier in the user's life for each death than is true of alcohol and, especially, cigarettes. Hence, with respect to number of years of life lost, to equal one crack cocaine death, it would take 10 cigarette deaths and perhaps three to five alcohol deaths. It seems entirely reasonable that the former would generate more public concern than the latter. Third, most cigarette deaths result from chronic conditions, such as lung cancer, whereas most cocaine and heroin deaths result from sudden, acute conditions, and sudden, dramatic deaths attract more attention than long-term, chronic deaths. Last, illicit drugs are implicated in maladies other than, and in addition to, direct drug-induced medical death: maladies such as drive-by and bystander shootings, robbery, burglary, holding a neighborhood hostage to drug dealers, addicted babies, and the spread of HIV/AIDS. Of course, some of these harms can be traceable to the illicit status of illegal drugs. Nonetheless, illegal drugs, especially cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, are implicated in other objective social problems more than the legal drugs are. And many of these conditions are what people worry most about.

One indicator of the subjective or constructionist perspective defining a social problem is the public's designation of drug abuse as the number one problem facing the country today. Between January 1986 and September 1989, the Gallup poll and the New York Times/CBS polls reported that the proportion of Americans naming drug abuse as the country's most important problem catapulted from 2 to 64 percent. Clearly in the late 1980s, the crack cocaine epidemic had caught the public's attention. In just 2 months, however, this figure had slipped to 38 percent; by July 1990, it had decreased to 18 percent and in August 1990, to only 10 percent. Throughout the 1990s and into the first 2 years of the new century, up until September 2001, the percentage of the U.S. population indicating drug abuse as the most important problem facing the country today remained in the 5 to 10 percent range. After the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the public's priorities shifted. A Gallup poll taken in November 2001 revealed that more than a third of the respondents (37 percent) named terrorism as the nation's top problem, and from then until today, somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of Americans, depending on the specific date of the survey, list drug abuse as the country's top social problem.

What the roller-coaster ride of drug abuse as a major social problem indicates is that conditions compete with one another for public attention and concern. In other words, a "carrying capacity," or saturation point, of public attention means only so many issues can rank near the top and, obviously, only one can be number one. The war in Iraq and the War on Terrorism crowded out drug use as a major social problem, causing its decline on the list of the public's major concerns.

Another way drug abuse is socially constructed as a social problem is through the criminal justice system. In 1970 the number of prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries totaled 200,000. As of 2006 the nation's prisons housed 1.5 million inmates; its jails held nearly 800,000 detainees. This enormous increase did not come about as a result of an increase in the crime rate; in fact, the country's crime rate declined sharply. In 1994, the violent crime victimization rate was 51.2 per 1,000; in 2005 it was 21.2. In 1977, the country's property crime victimization rate was 544.1; in 2005, it was 154.0. Likewise, the country's drug use has not increased since the 1970s; in fact, it has decreased. In 1979, 14.1 percent of respondents said they had used at least one illicit drug in the past month; in 2005, the figure was 8.1 percent. The figure for cocaine in 1979 was 2.6 percent, but in 2005 was 1.0 percent. What has happened is that arrests and incarcerations for drug possession have skyrocketed. In 1970, the country's drug arrests totaled 322,000; in 2004 they were more than 1.7 million. In 1970, 16 percent of all inmates housed in federal penitentiaries were sentenced for drug offenses; today, the figure is 55 percent. In the state prison system (whose population makes up 90 percent of all prisoners), there are more inmates incarcerated for a drug offense than a violent offense. The federal justice system spends $20 billion a year fighting the drug war; states spend roughly the same amount. Clearly, the country is waging a drug war, and that war is a measure of drug use as a social problem, an indicator of public concern about drug use.

The subjective recognition of substance abuse as a social problem does not mean that its designation is arbitrary or fanciful. Saying that drug use is a constructed problem is not to say that it is "just" a construction; not all social constructions are equal. Still, we must be alert to disjunctions between claims and evidence, and drug use represents one condition for  which such discrepancies are especially striking. In general, such discrepancies are normal because claims issue from interested parties, interest groups, political activists, and ideological and moral entrepreneurs, as well as a variety of other sources, whereas objective measures of material harm issue from social, medical, and natural scientists. By any criteria, drug abuse is a major social problem, but the claims made about the degree of harm it causes do not always match up with material reality. Indeed, this is one of the more intriguing features of drug use as a social problem.

Bibliography:

1) Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press.

2) Best, Joel. 2000. "The Apparently Innocuous 'Just,' the Law of Levity, and the Social Problems of Social Construction." Perspectives on Social Problems 12:3-14.

3) Goldstein, Paul J., Henry H. Brownstein, Patrick J. Ryan, andPatricia A. Bellucci. 1989. "Crack and Homicide in New York City, 1988: A Conceptually Based Event Analysis." Contemporary Drug Problems 16(Winter):651-87.

4) Himmelstein, Jerome J. 1983. The Strange Career of Marihuana: Politics and Ideology of Drug Control in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

5) Hingson, Ralph and Michael Winter. 2003. "Epidemiology and Consequences of Drinking and Driving." Alcohol Research and Health 27(1):63-78.

6) Horgan, Constance, Kathleen Carley Skwara, and Gail Strickler. 2001. Substance Abuse: The Nation's Number One Health Problem. Princeton, NJ: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

7) Krug, Etienne G., Linda L. Dahlberg, James A. Mercy, Anthony B. Zwi, and Rafael Lozano, eds. 2002. World Report on Violence and Health. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.