Essay On Collective Socialisation

It is estimated that illegal drug use costs the UK community as a whole around £15.4 billion every year (NHS, 2012). This is clearly a massive burden on the country, with large chunks of tax payers money being spent on both the treatment of drug use and rectifying the issues caused by those who use these illegal substances. These costs mean that spending must be cut on other things that receives government funding such as education. Bolton (2014) reports that from 2010 to 2014 we have seen a funding cut in the UK’s education system of around 4.9% which potentially could have been much lower had illegal drug use not cost the country so much. However, drug use does have benefits for certain smaller communities. Drug use tends to be most prevalent in poverty stricken areas where communities have …show more content…
This is commonly referred to as the effect of role models within a particular social context (Shaw et al., 2007). The negative role models that often dominate these sorts of communities give the impression to others that crime and drug use is the social ‘norm’ and that it is socially acceptable, trapping them in the ‘drug world’ and potentially causing more addiction, poverty and crimes in these small, concentrated communities (Shaw et al., 2007). Seddon (2000) suggests that one model of the link between crime and drugs is that ‘drugs lead to crime’. This theory suggests that most crime is a result of drug use whether it be that they are under the influence of drugs at the time or whether they are committing crime to fuel their addiction. A paper from Bresnihan (1999) actually advocated that around 80% of crime involving young people, in five deprived areas that he studied, was drug related. This shows that in some communities drug use plays a massive part in the high crime rates especially that involving young people; Therefore if drug use was to decline, in theory, so would