Part III Our Social and Physical Worlds
Drug abuse and criminal behavior are usually perceived as personal troubles. Both are considered deviant behavior, deviating from the normal expectation of not abusing drugs or engaging in criminal activity. We tend to believe that someone turns to drug use or criminal activity because of some personal defect, individual failure, or weakness. Yet both can be defined as public issues, emerging from the social structure and threatening the quality of human life.
Drug abuse and crime are the subject and focus of extensive scholarly research attempting to understand the extent and origins of both. Both problems also receive global attention, including from governments and public agencies monitoring and combating drug abuse and crime in their part of the world. These problems will be discussed in Chapters 12 and 13.
In the last three chapters of Part III, we will review social problems that affect our physical and natural worlds—problems related to urbanization (Chapter 14), the environment (Chapter 15), and war and terrorism (Chapter 16).
Though these issues involve our physical and natural worlds, both have definite human connections—humans cause these problems or experience consequences as a result of them. Environmentalist Paul Hawken (1993) explains, “Human activity is part of the natural world, in the largest sense, but human activity ignores the means-and-ends, give-and-take factors that are inherent in any maturing ecosystem” (p. 26). “Starting a war is a very bad idea, “ writes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (2014), “but it keeps happening anyway.”
