The article provides a detailed account of a May 1982 national moral panic about drugs that occurred in Israel and an analysis clustered along two axes. One axis uses the interest perspective to analyze the timing of the panic by focusing on the question of why it happened when it did. The other axis uses the moral perspective to interpret the specific content of the panic, focusing on why the panic was about drugs. The author presents his discussion of moral panics in the following sections: (1) Morality, Deviance, and Ideology: the Question of Content; (2) Moral Panic and Specific Political/Economic Interests: the Question of Timing; and (3) Sociology of Moral Panics. The specific interests of the parties involved in creating the panic primarily explain its timing. The political and social actors involved deliberately ignored data contradicting their views and thus achieved their specific goals. The actual content of the panic was explained mainly by resorting to the concepts of boundary maintenance, morality, and ideology, and secondarily to interests. Creating the moral panic provided an opportunity for actors adhering to one moral symbolic universe to fabricate an antagonistic moral universe, attack it, and thus redefine moral-symbolic boundaries between the morally desirable and the morally undesirable. Notes, references