ABSTRACT
A history of moral panics and alcohol and drug education brings into focus historical issues associated with adolescents and moral panics: A troubled history, indeed, and not entirely the fault of the social group in question. Temperance programmes in school education and their associated moral panics, adolescent youth culture moral panics and school education programmes in illicit-drug education were all interconnected, revealing the necessity of examining the historical antecedents of moral panics in people's attempts to understand fully these events in society, education and politics. People need to recognise moral panics associated with earlier temperance campaigns and later drug education campaigns were held to be moral panics only according to one's ideological point of view. Moral panics concerning illicit drugs came during the interwar period. The early mass community displays to the multi-media-fed illicit-drug moral panics, demonstrates the central role of the media in sparking and then sustaining illicit-drug related moral panics impacting on school and college education.
