Summary Of The Relativity Of Deviance By John Curra

In John Curra’s “The Relativity of Deviance”, chapter nine discusses drugs and drug taking. The introduction to the chapter speaks on the different opinions that various people have on drugs. They can be medical or for recreational uses. To some people, drugs are magical and have healing powers; to others, drugs are interesting or used for fun. In serious cases, drugs can be habit forming and can cause one’s life to spiral downward. Drugs have many uses and to each person, they mean something different. The term drug is complicated on its own but the term drug abuse is even more complicated. What can be seen as harmful and dangerous to one person can be medical and healing to another. There is no definite definition to what amount of a certain …show more content…
Many people turn to drugs in order to cope with difficult situations or just for fun and end up becoming hooked. From a sociological perspective, drugs and drug taking can be looked at from the big picture or the larger picture rather than individual. Conflict theory focuses on society as whole that influences groups and communities. Drugs such as cocaine and heroin have a much bigger impact on human health rather than alcohol and marijuana. Addiction to drugs such, as these tend to relate back to social class, power and income. Lower and middle class people seem to resort to these types of drugs because of social problems they are facing in life. Poor living conditions that relate back to politics and economics seem to be the reason. Research has found that the upper class has much less use of these types of drugs. The lower class is composed of either unemployed or uneducated, unskilled, and poor minimum wage workers. These dead end jobs are discouraging because the money the make is barely enough to cover any expenses needed for these families to survive. This is why many lower class people resort to drug dealing. The money drug dealing brings in is more than a minimum wage job without the taxes and the paper trail. People become drawn to it like moths to a flame. Due to the overwhelming existence of drugs in these communities, the likeliness of these people to get hooked is much higher than that of the upper class. …show more content…
It can better help explain this problem. Rational choice theory is the perspective of the actor as a rational purposive agent motivated by maximizing his or her rewards or realizing his or her interests. Social behavior is guided by rational calculation of exchange of costs and rewards so this in turn can help solve this issue. Drug abusers may be motivated to stop using rugs if they can see how much better their lives could be without drugs if only there were more drug-free programs in these lower income communities. Free rehabilitation centers run by the government need to be put into place in order to better attract drug