In Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta, and in Patricia Adler’s Hard Drugs in a Soft Context, both researchers studied groups of people and individuals who were involved in drugs. In both studies the results of the case were similar, with the conclusion that the groups they studied were protected by their environment and social capital from the “economic, legal, and physical danger” which someone not of their social class would experience quite differently (Adler 523). Even though the people involved in both studies were shielded from certain negative consequences, the drugs associated with each case were completely different and resulted in different stigmas towards the individuals associated with those drugs. In Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangster, the researcher studied college students in Southern California who dealt and smoked marijuana (some other drugs as well), where as in Hard Drugs in a Soft Context, the researchers studied college students in a Midwestern college town who used crack. While the California college students received many positive sanctions towards their label as a drug dealer, the crack users of middle America endured quite the opposite and were actually driven to hide their association to crack in an attempt to avoid the stigma that would follow others acknowledgement about their use of crack. These two completely different cases demonstrate many aspects of labeling theory in addition to the vast power of stigmas.
The Labeling Theory that applies to the college students relates more to Scheffs labeling theory than it does general labelists’ theories. The initial process of Scheff’s labeling is from a constructionist view, describing that labeling someone or something creates a condition and thus the condition becomes concretely real through the labeling process (Goode 303). But a majority of Scheff’s theory would put emphasis on causality and the fact that drug dealers and crack user/abusers exist prior to conscious thought, meaning...