Merton's Strain Theory

Young people are negatively portrayed in public as society usually identifies them as problematic. Since the unfavourable portrayal of youth created a stigma towards them, many sociologists argue that it would marginalise young people and youth would more likely to become deviance. Taylor (2008: 371) emphasises that the drug users are more likely to be presented as the ‘criminal outsiders’ since drug use are usually linked with criminal activities in mainstream society, referring that society tend to identify drug users as ‘others’ and separate them from our society with fear and loathing. Since the young drug users are discovered, different authorities would try to stigmatise and stereotype them as problematic which would threaten social order,

Merton’s strain theory suggests that there are social constructed goals and means in every society to define the meaning of success and ways to success, for example, achieving monetary success through education. However, due to the inadequate opportunity to obtain success, some people would be deviated to gain success through different means (more likely are the criminal acts). Though Agnew agrees Merton’s assumption, he believes that it is not adequate to explain youth problem since the financial goals are not the only things that leads to youth’s stress, but the negative emotions could also leads to strain (Agnew, 2001: 319). The three new categories are, ‘the loss of positive stimuli’, ‘the negative stimuli’ and ‘the blockage of goals’. Since youth are stereotyped as problematic, public would likelihood to discriminate them and excluded them from society which brings young people noxious stimuli (i.e. giving them unpleasant feeling as being stigmatised and isolated). Agnew (1992: 58) believes that the negative stimuli would increase youth strain and leads to delinquency. He explains since the negative stimuli generated stress towards young people, youth would hope to escape from, avoid, terminate and alleviate the negative stimuli by taking illicit drugs. Thus, young people would likelihood to be deviated and the situation of youth drug use and even other types of

From the statistic of Census and Statistic Department (2013), there was a rapidly increase on the number of young drug users (aged under 21 year-olds) in 2008, which raised from 2578 in 2006 to 3474 in 2008. Coincidentally, the concern of the student drug problem in Hong Kong was rapidly increased in 2008-2009. It is discover that there were several secondary students sent to the hospital due to taking overdose of drugs, and some of the students were found in ‘a dazed condition’ in the public place (Ng ,2009). Obviously, the moral panic that Cohen suggested was going to begin. Meanwhile, label towards teenager would start to create. Media begins to report students’ drug issues more frequently which increased public attention towards drug problem among people and created the label towards teenagers as problematic. Thus, the political parties would begins to call for public concern which urge for government intervention to combat the drug abuse among young people, for example, the Young DAB (2009) hosted a media conference, and provided some suggestions for government to solve the drug problem. Since political parties increased the attention of society towards the prevalent of drug use in young people, the label of problematic teenagers