Is the Objectivist Perspective Irrelevant?
As we see, the drug panic was constructed for a variety of reasons; a number of these reasons are subjective factors and have little, if anything, to do with the concrete damage or harm inflicted on the society by the use of illegal psychoactive substances. In this sense, the constructionists are correct; the 1986-9 outbreak of concern over drugs was a moral panic. On the other hand, we should not dismiss the objective dimension as completely irrelevant. Simply because a problem or crisis is constructed does not mean that it is imaginary. Because the media, politicians, and the public do not necessarily react to the objective features of a particular condition does not indicate or imply that they do not exist. (Levine and Reinarman [1988, pp. 255-6] make essentially the same point.) As measured by the human toll, drug use was not the most serious condition facing the country in the late 1980s. And recreational illegal drug use was actually declining at the precise period when public hy
