As a consequence, attitudes toward vice are prone to change over time, as has occurred in the case of drugs and gambling. In 1964, there were no lotteries in the United States, while today many States support lotteries as a means of raising revenues. A variety of salient social and symbolic factors are associated with the acceptance of lotteries on the one hand and increasing fear and moral panic about drug abuse on the other. In a pluralistic society, the acceptability of certain vices is affected by the rise and fall of Puritan values, Government fiscal needs and pressures, freedom of choice, and Government exploitation of moral weakness. Other factors that independently affect the moral acceptability of vice include personal familiarity with the activity, social status of the user/consumer, conventionality of lifestyles, desire to protect the young, the potency of the vice, its perceived controllability, private-public distinctions, and effects brought about by societal leaders and their policies. A sociologically grounded understanding of what is defined as a vice and a solution to it suggests the importance of ideologies grounded in cultural contexts and symbolic functions, rather than in scientific hypotheses and empirical research. 167 references.