ABSTRACT
Victimless crimes are best understood through the framework of interactionist theories, as the underlying disagreements regarding the appropriateness of the behaviors provide a fundamental lens for evaluation. There is a group of offenses that come under the heading of crimes without victims. Ideological dispute often comes to rest on a prototypic victimless crime: riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Considerable controversy in the victimless crime realm has focused on the idea of physician-assisted suicide or, as some calls it, “hastened death.”In the Netherlands, where drugs that are illegal in the United States have been freely available since 1976, reports indicate that there has been a notable reduction in crime. The debate regarding drug offenses as victimless crimes has taken one twist as persons who maintain that their medical condition could be helped and their pain alleviated if marijuana were made legally available to them joined the fray.
