Why a youth drug scene?
If the view is accepted, at least tentatively, that each generation spawns a larger or smaller proportion of deviant young people, and that these young people through the decades have sought for and found a deviant scene and life-style, complete with their own costume, hair styles, drugs, and sexual mores, a further question arises: why do drugs play so central a role in the currently dominant pattern of deviance? The data are not yet available for a definitive answer. But a few factors are already clearly visible. The first concerns, not the deviant scene itself, but one’s perception of it. Throughout the past century, society has tended to focus its dismay on two areas of youthful behavior drugs and sex and to condemn deviance from generally accepted standards in either area. In recent years, while still on occasion deploring sexual nonconformity, society appears to be much more concerned with illicit drug use among deviant subcultures. Again, young people discovered during the 1960s
