Research: Drugs

This video talks of the severe drug addiction in Afghanistan and how it is used as a painkiller as they cannot afford anything else. It is also used to stop hunger so people eat less and therefore are able to survive for longer. 

Many of these addicts are at a very young age, sometimes as young as three years old, and due to the horrendous poverty many children have to work to get money for the drug. In this documentary there is a young child who is working as a child prostitute in order to fund for his habit.

This video talks of a new drug called Krokadil which makes the skin scaly and start to rot. The drug is named Krokadil because it resembles the skin of a crocodile. This drug can easily be made by legal products from the pharmacy and is extremely dangerous. 

After seeing many clips I have noticed that the boom in herion and opium is due to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, as the Afghans started growing opium in order to fund for the war. This has now led to a widespread drug addiction in many areas, especially Afghanistan itself and Russia. 

Trainspotting

This movie follows a group of friends all addicted to heroin and shows how deeply the drug has affected their lives. Renton, acted by Ewan McGregor, is desperately trying to unhook himself from the drug in order to restart his life and apart from showing the horrible side of heroin he also explains the reasons why people get involved in drug use and the difficulty of stopping. (This can be seen in both the scene when he is preparing to detox and when his parents have locked him in his room) the poverty in Edinburugh in the 1980s is also demonstrated thorough this film and the desperate need for money, usually to purchase more drugs. 

 

Dead Baby Scene

I think by far the most horrifying scene in this movie is when Renton awakes to Allison's heart broken sobs when she discovers that her baby Dawn has died due to neglect. This scene harshly demostrates the serious effects of the drug as it shows that when you are high you think of nothing else, nothing around you matters and you are living in your own world. However when you return back to your life there is much pain and misery, usually much more than a person who doesn't use drugs. This scene suggests it is a huge cycle as straight after discovering her baby's death Allison then goes on to ask for a hit for the pain she feels, so that she can forget everything that happened and keep her eyes shut. The fact that she does this shows that she hasn't learnt from her mistakes and that when it comes between heroin and her life she will always choose heroin. This is one of the main messages at the beginning of the movie:

'Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit-crushing ga me shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your futu re. Choose life. I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you've got heroin?'

It is likely that Trainspotting was written as a reflection of the moral panic at the time, as the emergence of HIV/AIDS occured in the 1980s, when this book was set. This moral panic was used by the media to create a stereotypical image of herion users and it led to press sensationalism which gave the public incorrect information. The image people think of when talking of heroin addicts seems to be an ill, skinny and deciteful user who lives a life of crime and poverty. Many campaigns utilise heroin in order to shock people, such as the campaign in 2000 which shows a baby injecting himself with heroin and sitting on a pile of his own waste. This means that unhelpful information is being given about addiction and drug use, and there isn't enough proof to say that these campaigns actually scare people away from the drug. In fact it can be seen that these campaigns have actually increased experimentation. This is because creating a taboo around the subject therefore increases curiosity and also encourages teens going through a hard time to rebel against society and opt for the worst option due to the reactions of others.

If we were to use drugs and HIV/AIDS as our moral panic we could demostrate the causes of drug use and might dwell more on how the boom of drug making came about. An idea could be about the use of drugs as a terrorist attack on Russia, by exporting tonnes of heroin over the borders they both gain money from it and slowly destroy the country. The drug Krokadil could be used to create a horror movie about how people's skin turn scaly, and could be exaggerated for dramatic effect. We could also have a specific focus on terrorists and different methods used to slyly destory other countries.