5 - Drugs and the Visual

Summary

Introduction

Of all of the social problems associated with crime and justice, perhaps none occupies space on the registers of visual culture like the problem of drugs. Long a central site and locus of criminological inquiry, drugs and the related issues they give rise to have always been essential characters in the drama of crime and justice, and those dramas largely play themselves out in the field of the visual image. From the menacing image of the crazed marijuana user immortalized in the film Reefer Madness (1936) to contemporary visual productions like popular ‘Faces of Meth’ campaigns, drug trends and associated issues and problems are constructed and communicated, reified, and even fabricated and cut from the whole cloth of the visual. The visual world(s) of drugs is also perhaps the best and most salient available example to illustrate the sort of flexibility and ‘unfixedness’ of images and aesthetics, the way that images and visual cultures have their meanings negotiated by the social processes that constitute the practice of seeing.

This chapter surveys the various ways in which drugs are given life and meaning in the visual registers of crime and culture, what might be learned or uncovered from those meanings, and the various— and, in the case of drugs, considerable— moments in which an explicitly visual criminology has already begun to engage with the specter of drugs. Among the most immediately relevant dimensions of drugs in visual culture, for a visual criminology, are important questions of ethics, representation, framing, power, and meaning, and so those are the questions to which we now turn.

Drugs, cinema, and media

Like police and prisons, drugs play an essential— and intensely visual— role in constructing the image(s) of crime, harm, and justice that inform the social imagination. Indeed, among the very first films ever produced was a roughly 30- second silent kinetograph called Chinese Opium Den (1894). Unsurprisingly, the film— which was commissioned by none other than the renowned American inventor Thomas Edison and filmed by photographer W.K. Laurie Dickson— depicted, simply, a Chinese man smoking opium.