Rising public concern about drug use in the late 1980's was called a drug "panic" or "scare". This phenomenon has not been born over night but rather has been building up throughout the 1980s, and finally exploded in the late 1985 and early in 1986. The special public concern was targeted on cocaine, more specifically, crack, a cocaine derivative. Drug use in general became a crucial social problem of the decade. For a number of reasons which will be discussed later drug use, abuse, and exploitation became as apparent as never before. In this very decade the drug issue has occupied million’s of minds and emerged as a huge social problem. During those times the concept "tougher on crimes" became widely used in society for the reasons of drug frenzy in the country, the government intentions were to establish such harsh laws which would scare criminals and make them think twice before committing a crime, of using or selling drugs.

The reasons behind the craze over drug use were numerous and at times unobvious. Something began happening in first year of the decade of the 1980s, public tolerance of the use of illegal drug use declined, the belief that the use of drugs is harmful increased, convictions that possessing or selling illegal drugs should be decriminalized or legalized declined, even the use of the drugs declined. In 1980s America experienced enormous increase in public concern about drug use and abuse. In the middle of this decade crack or potent crystalline form of cocaine, was practically an unknown drug in the United States and by late 1985, it was broadly used in urban areas. The appearing suddenness of crack's widespread use and the degree to which it has been used in some neighborhoods made the crack story popular among news reporters and gave the public the notion that a huge drug crisis has exploded overnight. In reality drugs mainly were used in certain neighborhoods in big cities such as NY, Los Angeles and Chicago. Thus, it was not simply the greater threat than new patterns of crack use posed but the unknown drug and the thorough news coverage which gave up rise to this problem and made a major social concern out of it.

Another episode that caused tougher sentencing predominantly associated with drug use was caused by the death of famous athletes. In June 1986, hardly a week apart, two popular young athletes died of a cocaine overdose. On June 19, University of Maryland basketball forward Len Bias, and on June 27, Cleveland Browns' defensive back Don Rogers. One of the major reasons why Bias’ death was so much talked about is the proximity of Maryland to the Capitol where decisions on crime policies are taken. Country such as the United States, that praises sports figures would be treating the death of their athletes not only as a tragedy, but also will consider this death as a basic and common for the society as a whole. In the case of mid 80s that was a certain thing, which was generously discussed in all media channels creating more noise around it than it fairly should.

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