Grassroots Moral Panics

Recent Moral Panics

In the wake of the moral panic over drug use, grassroots organizations turned to another moral panic, this one related to alcohol. For example, the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) appeared, and many states raised their legal drinking age and lowered their blood-alcohol level criterion for impaired driving. A new wave of morality was heralded in the media as America's “new temperance,” according to Newsweek and Time, the “sobering of America,” according to Business Week, and America's “new abstinence,” according to Fortune. Within this spirit of new temperance and a concern about the victimization of children, fetal alcohol syndrome evolved into a moral crusade by the 1980s with its disturbing images of children debilitated, like crack babies, by their mothers’ consumption of drugs. More recently, the reaction to so-called club drugs, especially ecstasy, has been analyzed in terms of a moral panic by Matthew Collin and John Godfrey in the United Kingdom and by Philip Jenkins in the United States.

One of the most dramatic examples of moral panics related to drug use occurred in the late 1980s, when public concern about drug use peaked in 1985–86. Although the concern over drugs during this time was grounded in escalating rates of violence associated with the cocaine industry, and highly publicized fatal overdoses among users of crack, a cocaine derivative, most scholars agree that the disproportionate claims about the extent of crack use and the threat that it posed was not a classic moral panic, but it was a moral panic nonetheless. While this moral panic also involved activist groups and elites, there was certainly a grassroots element to it.

In the 1980s drug use generally came to be seen as that decade's premier social problem, occupying a significant and troubling space in the public consciousness. The panic over crack, which lasted until around 1990, traces its roots to the early 1980s when, in a reversal of social trends that marked the 1970s, public tolerance of the use of illegal drugs declined, belief that their use is harmful increased, belief that their use, possession, and sale should be decriminalized or legalized declined, and their actual use declined. In a defining moment of the moral panic over drugs, which sparked grassroots moral panics, a series of presidential speeches between June and September of 1986 by Ronald Reagan called for a national “crusade against drugs, a sustained, relentless effort to rid America of this scourge.”

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