Introduction
On this planet, there are billions of people and hundreds of nations with their own traditions, religions and beliefs. In order to try to live in peace and harmony, people decided to divide actions into legal and illegal and created laws and rules. Still, there are some individuals who do not care about rules, do what they want and are not afraid of breaking the law.
Sometimes, their actions are harmless to other people, which poses a question of whether they should remain illegal or not. Those actions that do not pose any danger to a certain society or the whole world may go through the normalisation process and become accepted as normal. It may happen in certain countries or all over the world.
Nowadays, the drug problem is one of those that are going through the normalisation process. The purpose of this paper is to critically discuss the ways in which normalisation theory explains how social trends shape the social control of drugs.
Normalisation Process Theory
Social normalisation is the process by which behaviour and ideas that may go beyond social norms and hence are not accepted by society are becoming normal. The normalisation concept is described in Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punishment, where he writes about disciplinary authority.
According to Foucault (2019), normalisation, among other things, is about constructing an idealised form of behaviour and then rewarding or punishing those individuals who conform or deviate from this form. For instance, normalisation defines how an ideal soldier should march, stand, speak and hold a weapon.
Foucault (2019) believed that to ensure maximum social control with minimal expenditure of force, there are many tactics, and normalisation is one of them. He called it disciplinary authority; it appeared during the 19th century and was widely used in hospitals, military barracks, schools, shelters, offices and factories. Therefore, it became an essential aspect of modern societies’ social structure.
However, normalisation is not only for constructing an idealised norm of behaviour but also for uniting people. There are many behavioural attitudes that are considered reasonable by the society. For example, grieving for a loved one, working and earning money, avoiding danger, getting married and having children and not being a terrorist.
Nowadays, the world is changing rapidly and continuously, and the situation in which a person is at the moment may be easily changed by many things. It is believed that human behaviour may be influenced by various factors like past experience, mental strength, environment, other people and the media and physical strength (Berdayes and Murphy, 2015).
Usually, one is able to decide what things to to allow to influence him or her. These decisions determine whether this person is capable of making rational decisions or not (Tazzyman et al., 2019). Many people cannot see the effects and consequences of their actions after they let something influence them and their decisions.
As it was said above, the world changes, so that means that people, traditions, beliefs, rules and laws also become different. That is why some things that were considered to be wrong and unacceptable many years ago are absolutely normal now (Xanidis and Gumley, 2019). For example, tattoos and piercings were not socially acceptable in the past, women could not wear trousers and homosexuality was considered to be a disease (Robinson, 2017).
Now all of those things are accepted by society almost all over the world and are not frowned upon. In the last decades of the twentieth century, some disability theorists and researchers promoted the idea of normalisation as emancipatory, both socially and individually and as a sign of both social and personal progress.
It is hard to disagree that the normalisation process lets people who are left outside of society feel accepted. Tremain (2017, p. 62) believes that “Wolf Wolfensberger gave birth to a social movement, grounded in the “normalisation principle,” that denounced the forced institutionalization of cognitively impaired people”.
According to Tremain (2017), the normalisation process provides disabled people and people who differ from others with the opportunity to have significant social roles. It is essential because usually, the society is unequal and values some roles less than others. The aim of the normalisation process is to get those people access to the world and the wider community, let them live a full life and enjoy the communication. It is achieved by increasing their potential, self-perception and ability to protect their interests, and by changing their appearance to make them look more socially accepted.
Stigma
The process of normalisation is completely opposed to social stigma. Social stigma is the discrimination against and disapproval of someone. This discrimination is based on social characteristics that help to distinguish people who do not comply with the rules and laws from other, regular members of society. Social stigma may appear in many different forms: people are usually stigmatized because of their race, culture, intelligence, gender, disease and health. Those people who are stigmatized often feel different and devalued by other members of society (Brown, Stoffel and Munoz, 2019).
Also, stigma can be defined as some kind of label that associates the person with a set of bad characteristics and traits that form a stereotype (Center for Chemical Process Safety, 2018). As soon as people identify and then label someone’s differences, the labelled person will be stigmatized until the stigmatizing attribute becomes either normal or undetectable.
Creating groups requires significant generalization, which means that people will probably include someone in a common group regardless of whether this person actually fits into it or not. However, the attributes chosen by the society depend on place and time, so things that are considered inappropriate in one society or country may be normal somewhere else. When a society divides people into particular groups, the person who is labelled loses his or her status and becomes discriminated against. As soon as the cultural stereotype is established, the society begins to shape expectations for those groups.
Stigma has an effect on the behaviour of those people who are stigmatized. They usually start acting as the society that stigmatizes them expects them to. This fact modifies their behaviour and influences their emotions, thoughts and beliefs (Miller, 2016). People who belong to stigmatized social groups usually have to deal with prejudices that worry them and lead to depression and other psychological diseases. Being stigmatized puts people in threatening situations like doubting and hating themselves and having low self-esteem.
Three Groups of Stigmatized People
It is obvious that there are many different and unacceptable things to stigmatize people for. That is why there are three groups of stigmatized individuals. The first one consists of those people who have physical manifestations of disabilities, such as scars and deformities.
Unfortunately, the main part of society is afraid of and tries not to communicate with people who have different appearances even if they cannot change them and do not choose to look like that. The second group consists of people with deviant personal traits like mental illnesses, criminal tendencies and drug addictions. The third group’s members are people stigmatized because of their ethnicity, race and religion.
Stigma and Normalisation
Based on all of the above, it is difficult to disagree with the fact that the normalisation process helps people to feel being a part of the society. It is rather challenging for humans to be apart from others, to feel different and unaccepted. It is not rare that a person is stigmatized because of something that he or she cannot change, and that does not pose any danger for others. That is why the normalisation process is necessary: it fights with injustice and tries to equalize people who should be equal.
Social Control Theory
The theory of social control suggests that values, relationships, obligations, beliefs and norms of people encourage them to obey the law. So, if people are united and interested in the broader community and they accept and learn moral codes, they will voluntarily limit their tendency to commit deviant actions.
However, Inderbitzin, Bates and Gainey (2016) believe that human beings are basically antisocial, and deviance is part of the natural order in society. Anyway, the social control theory aims at understanding how to reduce the likelihood of individuals committing crimes. According to Deflem and Wellford (2019, p. 2), social control is “a functional response to crime”. In criminology, the theory of social control suggests that the use of the social learning and process of socialization reduce the tendency of behaviour recognized as antisocial and create self-control.
Three Types of Social Control
The social control theory was developed by Francis Ivan Nye and based on functionalist theories of crime. Nye (1975) suggests that control is divided into three types: direct, indirect and internal. The direct one means that for any wrong behaviour, there is punishment threatened or applied, and any compliance is immediately rewarded by family, teachers and authorities. Indirect control works by reminding a person of those people who influence his or her behaviour.
For example, parents and other people may feel disappointed and hurt because of that person’s delinquent act. Also, in this type of social control, other distant factors such as traditions, customs, religion, public opinion and other people’s rationalized actions help to keep the person’s behaviour under control. Internal social control is the one that is inside a person, for instance, his or her own sense of right and wrong. It also decreases the likelihood of this person deviating from social norms and breaking the law.
Jackson Toby’s and Travis Hirschi’s Theories
The problem is that, nowadays, the youth is turning towards crimes by seeing them through the social media: news, movies, cartoons and video games are filled with crimes, criminals and violence. Many people live in poverty in bad parts of cities, where crimes are usual events. After seeing many people who deviate from social norms, it is hard for children to grow up and develop internal control as their own sense of right, wrong, good and bad is not strong enough.
Jackson Toby (1957) discussed why young people were disinclined or inclined to be engaged in delinquent activities. Toby’s point of view is that those people who are part of the non-delinquent community fell that they will lose too much if they join delinquent groups and usually decide not to do that. Toby called that stake in conformity and believed that this was another method of social control.
It is essential to mention that Travis Hirschi supported and developed Toby’s idea of stake in conformity. Moreover, Inderbitzin, Bates and Gainey (2018) believed that the social control theory is most associated with Hirschi. He insists that rationality is a crucial part of the person’s decision whether to participate in a crime or not (Hirschi, 2017). He also believes that one is less likely to become a criminal if he or she has strong social bonds.
In 1990, together with Michael R. Gottfredson, they developed a self-control theory. This is a criminological theory that suggests that the main reason for criminal behaviour and actions is the lack of individual self-control (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990). According to this theory, if a child was ineffectually parented and raised before the age of ten, he or she would develop less self-control than those children who were raised with better care and parenting.
Also, Gottfredson (2017) says that self-control may be together with impulsivity and irritability in one person. Gottfredson and Hirschi (2019) also state that there is a correlation between the low levels of self-control and impulsive and criminal actions. However, there is an opinion that their theory is not as perfect and logical as it seems.
Ronald Akers’ disagreement
Ronald L. Akers criticizes the self-control theory in his book Criminological Theories: Introduction and Evaluation. According to Akers (2013), there is a significant disadvantage of Gottfredson’s and Hirschi’s theory. Its downside is that the scientists did not divide people’s tendency toward criminal behaviour and self-control and did not define them separately.
According to Wells (2017), the fact that the criminal behaviour and self-control traits are not described individually, one may wrongly suggest that the tendency for criminal behaviour and concepts of low self-control are the same. Also, it wrongly indicates that if a person has low self-control, he or she is or will become a criminal.
Drugs and Social Trends
Drugs
For many decades, the drug problem is one of the most difficult in the whole world. Philosophers, scientists, medics, politicians and ordinary people argue about the danger and benefits of drugs and cannot decide who is right. Some say that either all or some kinds of drugs are harmless and should be legal everywhere.
There are countries like, for example, the Netherlands, Mexico, Australia and Canada, where drugs are not totally illegal and may be possessed and done in small amounts. In some countries, drugs still remain illegal, but the process of their normalisation has already been started. There is hidden propaganda of drugs in everyday culture: music, clothes, fashion, movies, books and video games.
Reasons for making drugs legal
Those people who state that drugs should be legalized have some crucial arguments. There is a philosophical statement that, in a free and normal society, adults should be allowed to do whatever they want. The condition is that they take responsibility, accept the consequences of their own actions and choices and cause no harm to other people. The pragmatic argument is that if high-quality drugs are widely available and cheap, then the illegal drug market will be eliminated, drugs’ quality and price will be regulated, and law enforcement costs, including incarceration and arrest, will decrease.
Drug legalization also means that countries’ governments will spend less money on law enforcement and, moreover, get a new and rather profitable source of taxes and benefit from it. Crimes that are connected with drugs will fall when most of the drugs become easily accessible. Also, there are some kinds of drugs that are helpful and may be used in medicine, so if not legalizing all the drugs, then just those ones.
Reasons for drugs to be illegal
It is hard to disagree that there are many arguments for not decriminalizing drugs. It seems like they are more convincing as the number of countries where drugs are illegal is greater than the number of those where they are decriminalized. First of all, many kinds of drugs are harmful to people’s health and the nervous system. Those who do drugs over a long period of time ruin themselves and may not have healthy children. If medications are decriminalized, probably, more people will want to try them as this will not be a crime anymore. Hence, there is a possibility that more humans will become addicted, and future generations will be weaker.
Another argument for prohibiting drugs is that a person who does them loses control over his or her mind, body and actions and may also pose a danger for other people. This person becomes addicted and may be easily controlled, and there are more chances for him or her to become a criminal. People lose their families, jobs, houses and friends because they cannot get rid of their addiction by themselves and cannot afford help. Moreover, if drugs are decriminalized, there still should be many restrictions for children and young people. Those restrictions will lead to violations by adolescents as it now happens with alcohol and cigarettes.
Social Trends
One may define social trends as any type of activity that almost all people take part in; social trends appeared when human societies began to form. Social trends may be short-lived and long-lasting depending on their innovativeness and how interested they make people. Usually, social trends result from the reaction of society to some cultural aspects such as music, clothing, ways of communication and fashion.
Although social trends are often suggested by cultural minorities, the majority believes that the trends are their own and follow them. It takes the whole society to experience something so that this something becomes a trend. They may be considered to be an essential part of communities as they provide people with a sense of togetherness, unite them, cultures and countries. Unfortunately, social trends may be both positive and negative, and if a negative trend is popular and long-lasting, it spoils the society and causes many problems.
It is evident that one of the negative social trends is drugs. Thanks to the cultural propaganda of these narcotic substances, it becomes normal for people to see drug images and references everywhere. If one looks back, a hundred years ago, there was no constant mentioning of drugs. Of course, there were people who did them, but it was not popular because no one talked about that, no one showed the images and made movies about drug addicts. That is why young people had less temptation to try it, and now everything around the person reminds him or her about narcotic substances. They become a social trend; teenagers boast about doing drugs as if it was a real success.
Normalisation Process and Drugs
There is information that after decriminalizing drugs, many advantages appear, and the social situation gets better. As it was said above, the normalisation process is about behaviour and ideas that may go beyond social norms becoming normal and accepted. According to Sznitman and Taubman (2016), after decriminalization, substance addiction and abuse rates are cut almost in half. Addiction treatments and rehabilitations become less expensive; hence, more humans are able to afford them.
Because of that, people with substance abuse problems are much more likely to get recovered normally and start a new life than to go to prison for breaking the law (Shiner and Winstock, 2015). Those who get recovered are able to become productive members of society. The normalisation process helps the addicted people to feel accepted, belonging and normal. They realize that no one puts shame on them, stop avoiding society and usually become ready to ask for help and accept it.
Violence and crimes related to drugs reduce, so the police and courts are freed up and able to concentrate on some more important jobs. When people understand that doing drugs is not a crime, they usually lose the rebellious spirit and do not see the point of them anymore. Also, when a person sees drugs use as a disease and not as a crime, his or her attitude towards the addiction changes.
As to the normalisation of the drugs, this process should not increase the number of those people who do them. Instead of that, it should just let the addicted people become part of society. Those who are addicted but do not pose any danger should not be ignored and left out of the community. Their decision to use narcotic substances does not give other people the right to stigmatize and shame them. This is what the drug normalisation process is and should be about.
Conclusion
To draw a conclusion, one may agree that there always have been and will be subjects that people cannot agree about. It happens because there are thousands of ideas, opinions and beliefs that seem to be true or false to different people depending on everyone’s own experience, morals, norms and ideals. Over time, laws and traditions change everywhere as people, for example, understand that things that were forbidden and considered wrong before are actually harmless and may become accepted in society, and vice versa. The problem of drugs seems to remain the subject of discussions for many years.
Both with decriminalization and prohibition of drugs, there will be people who agree and those who do not, those who do drugs and those who never do that. There are individuals who are ready to break the law and become criminals just to get what they want. So, it seems like at least nowadays there is no right decision, and the proper answer to the drug question is still to be found.
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