> The popular culture that celebrates drugs and dealers.
You mean modern medicine? That's what makes this problem so pernicious - so much of it was created by the people fictionalized in shows like House MD and Grey's Anatomy not The Wire and Breaking Bad.
For thousands of years the natural opioids morphine & codeine have been almost universally recognized as harmful dependency-inducing substances in their own category, that build a tolerance which can almost never be limited beyond a certain number of years, before the toxicity overcomes any therapeutic benefit there might have been upon initial administration.
After all this time a religious person of many different faiths over the recent centuries might have often said that for long-term use they were put on earth by god for people who can not be expected to recover.
Synthetic opioids are just the modern version which were developed because the natural product itself can not be patented.
Hence "patent medicine".
The habit-forming effect is what made the Sacklers the richest pharmaceutical barons so far.
Obviously he doesn't mean that, there's an enormous body of media and art that glamorizes drug dealing and using. It stretches across ethnicity and class. It begins with alcohol and weed, stretches into cocaine and hallucinogens, and from there gets into the heavy drugs.
If the only input into drug addiction was the modern medical industry over-prescribing opioids, the landscape of modern drug use would look very different.
Does any recent media actually glorify the drugs that are causing the worst problems right now? I watch a lot of TV but have less exposure to popular music so I'm genuinely unsure.
There's plenty of alcohol, weed, cocaine, and hallucinogens, I'll give you that, but they're not gateways to opioid addiction. Breaking Bad glorifying the manufacture and sale of meth is the only except I can think of - Oxy, fentanyl, and p2p meth aren't exactly the drugs musicians and Hollywood turn to as a lyrical/plot device.
There's also a fine line between glorifying and entertaining. I struggle to find any such glorification in shows like Snowfall, for example, which mostly shows the very negative impacts of crack cocaine in cities. There's only a single character in the entire run that manages to overcome the drug and the main character is a tragic anti-hero at best.
Any time heroin or another opioid comes up in pop culture it's almost always in the context of horrifying drug dens.
I would argue that if one watches Breaking Bad to its conclusion that it's hard to say that it glorified the manufacture and sale of meth. Everyone involved has huge negative consequences in their lives as a result. The collateral damage is staggering. By the end, Walt seems as addicted to the sense of power that making meth gives him as the user of meth desperately seeking their next hit. He sabotages himself and ultimately gets himself shot (probably killed -- though I think this is open to interpretation) chasing his last hit.
I think "high school chem teacher builds a drug empire that rivals Mexican cartels" is definitely a glorified macho-suburban fantasy elevated to an art form. In reality season 1 would have ended with Bryan Cranston's character dissolving in a vat of drain cleaner or buried out in the New Mexican desert missing his head and fingers. I mean, look at the drug addict that gets the most screen time in the show: he's the cofounder of the drug empire guiding the main character through the drug game like a methed out Master Miyagi.
Compare it with Snowfall: the main character's family has at least some history of drug dealing and he only succeeds because he discovers a cheap and ultra-addictive recipe for crack cocaine and because the CI-freaking-A is using him to fund the global war on communism. Recurring characters get killed off in dumb gang skirmishes all the time and the drug addict with the most screen time is literally a shell of her former self that can barely get through the day up until the latest season.
Or compare it with The Wire: all the people involved in the drug game are only in it because they have literally nothing else to live for except the glory of the game. Basically no one survives except the cops and Bubbles never really gets fully clean.
It does the antihero bit pretty well. It shows life going on after Walt's brother in-law is killed. In real life people would be a lot more torn apart by it, and not just sad.
The main thing it glorifies I think is that boys will be boys, not drugs per se.
> There's plenty of alcohol, weed, cocaine, and hallucinogens, I'll give you that, but they're not gateways to opioid addiction.
This is only partially accurate. There are two primary "pipelines" to opioid addiction; one of them is overreliance on painkillers, but the other one is fairly standard risk-seeking escalation through a socially deleterious lifestyle, often culminating in an OD or a prison sentence after a predictable years-long risk escalation path through social drug use.
I will agree that I don't think there's a lot of media showing meth or fentanyl use as cool and attractive, but my overall point is less that a specific drug needs to be shown to be cool, and more that the artistic construction of the drug lifestyle as alternative, exciting, rebellious etc. wears down the emotional barriers of a lot of people when they're young and malleable. I've done a good number of drugs in my day and I can assure you that in the case of most of the people I did drugs with, early exposure to "drugs are cool" art and music played a part in their ready acceptance of the lifestyle.
As one example, if you go to a high school party, often the riskiest, coolest kids will go off in private and do drugs. There's no feedback loop in the media to make this look pathetic or sketchy--on the contrary, most drug use is played for laughs, or it's added as another dimension to a lifestyle that's supposed to be tragic but instead looks awesome. "Oh my god, look at this guy's life, he's a mess, his apartment is so dirty, he's doing lines off the mirror... with a smoking hot supermodel-actress while we do a B-plot story about how his small-town parents are boring and stodgy... and he's a rock star..."
I don't really know whether or not you could seriously reduce drug use by not showing it in the media, but I do believe that showing it as positively as it is now increases drug use. And I haven't even mentioned the music surrounding drugs.
> Oxy, fentanyl, and p2p meth aren't exactly the drugs musicians and Hollywood turn to as a lyrical/plot device.
Oxy is hugely glamorized in rap music. Drinking "lean" / cough syrup and doing Percocet pills. Future song "Molly Percocet". The Weeknd's record label is called XO for Ecstasy / Oxy.
I still tend to disagree because I have a hard time finding balance and not going too far in restricting the media I consume, but it's a nice vision.
A lot of the religious right in the US, especially the part that is led by televangelists like the late Pat Robertson, just wants to suppress it out of ignorance and they have no plan except to throw more and more people in jail, creating more X to prison pipelines.
After reading this article, I agree with the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, thank you for the recommendation.
> The religious right in the US just wants to suppress it out of ignorance
I tend to agree that the religious right in the US is a legislative force that does more harm than good, and that many people who campaign against drugs don't have a solid understanding of drugs or drug culture. However, I don't think that it's ignorant to want to suppress drug culture (either in the media or in real life), and I think more religious conservatives have experience with addict family members than you think.
Good point, I ninja edited just before you posted to say that a chunk of them have been mislead by televangelists and such.
I can tell Thich Nhat Hanh appreciated the people you're talking about, having read about him traveling all around the world and meeting people from the US (where he lived for quite some time) and countless other countries.
One of the principles that I hold to pretty strongly is that the more performatively famous someone is surrounding a certain idea, the more likely it is that they don't have any real principles, and they're just beating whatever drum allows them to continue to hold influence over people. So someone like Pat Robertson doesn't actually believe what he's saying in private, but if he kept banging that drum he kept his lifestyle and acolytes. I think the majority of US politicians that people recognize by name are like that, and certainly most religious leaders like Pat or Joel Osteen.
You mean modern medicine? That's what makes this problem so pernicious - so much of it was created by the people fictionalized in shows like House MD and Grey's Anatomy not The Wire and Breaking Bad.