For Macquarie University, Anth106Question attached.

CHOSEN TOPIC—
3. HOW HAVE ILLICIT DRUGS BECOME SYMBOLIC SCAPEGOATS IN WIDER SOCIAL CONFLICTS? DISCUSS WITH REFERENCE TO AT LEAST TWO COUNTRIES.
Table of Contents
Introduction    3
Illicit Drugs having become Scapegoats in USA    3
Illicit Drugs having become Scapegoats in Australia    5
Conclusion    7
References    8
Introduction
It has become common notion that illicit drug use as a scapegoat for many social conflicts. World suffer from many pressing social issues such as domestic violence, unemployment, depression and high crime rates. It has been seen that most of the illicit drug use are often considered responsible for the root cause of all these issues. To some extent, illicit drug use might be responsible for social conflict. On the contrary, there are many factors, which are responsible for the social conflict.
Over the period, the consumption of the illicit drugs and abuse of the pharmaceutical drug resulted in occu
ence causing social conflict. All the countries in the world have faced the similar problem related to the illicit drug use. Some of the developed countries such as America and Australia have been fighting to control drug use by implementing various policies but failed. The following essay tries to analyse this issue.
Illicit Drugs having become Scapegoats in USA
Despite being one of the most developed countries in the world, USA failed to control the selling and consumption of the illicit drug use. There are many times that racism in the country is justified based on the illicit drug use (Aurin, 2000). In USA, it has been considered that the immigrants mainly Mexican, Chinese and Black people are responsible for the high rates of the crime because these people are addict to the illicit drugs or engaged in selling of the drugs in the country. One of the famous examples was the conflict between Mexican labourer, or Black people and local farmers in 20th century.
According to Bu
(1984), when Mexican and Black migrants used to consume marijuana, these immigrants were given jobs by wealthy farmers as these labourers work at low wages compared to the local labourers. The local small farmers find it difficult to adjust with these people and consider responsible their economic failure. When economic conflict arises, local people attacked Mexicans and Black people’s marijuana consumption habit. They spread the rumours that these people are responsible for causing violence and insanity in the country.
On the contrary, some of the journalist also contributed to increase the myth related to the marijuana by using headlines like killer weed and marijuana menace (Himmelstein, 1983). This resulted in formation of the perception of the society towards these people. Thus, Mexicans and Black labourer were stereotyped as violent people. Over the period, marijuana was used as a scapegoat for many kinds of issues such as poverty, racism and discrimination. Some of the groups in the society considered marijuana responsible for poor education and high crime rates among youth. This resulted in prohibition of the consumption or possession of the marijuana in the country (Manderson, 1995).
On the contrary, in 1990s, when pharmaceutical industry had given insurance to the physicians, they opioid medicines are safe for consumption, then high rate opioid medicine had been prescribed to the people. Over the period, when society realised that opioid medicines are addictive in nature, it had been too late, as illegal selling and possession of the drug become common. It has been seen that people start using illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaine or synthetic drugs (Hoffmann, 1990). The elaborated network of...