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Crossing the line in front of millions of viewers: have drugs normalized popular culture?

2022-12-06T11:11:41.905Z


Drug use has a presence never seen before in hit series and music, but in some cases it is not clear to what extent they reflect reality


The latest series by David Simon, creator of

The Wire

(2002-2008), is

The City Is Ours

(premiered this year on HBO Max).

In it, Simon goes back and forth in time to tell how difficult it is to put doors on the drug field.

Throughout six chapters, the viewer is aware of how convoluted and muddy an ecosystem such as the sale of prohibited substances is in the streets of Baltimore.

"Before, in a series like Simon's, this would be unthinkable," says Fidel Moreno, director of Cáñamo

magazine

.

“But it allows us to question the failure of the war on drugs and how that fight generates more pain and suffering for the communities in the barrios.

In the end it is a war against the poor”.

La ciudad es nuestra

is just one more example of how drugs have acquired new relevance in contemporary culture: “Seeing how certain drugs are mentioned according to which people speaks to us of tolerance and normalization on topics such as Rigoberta Bandini,

Too Many Drugs

, or the latest album by the Taburete band,

Madame Ayahuasca

”, affirms Moreno.

Its members appear rolling joints in interviews, without thinking about any movement that contravenes the rules.

“It has gone from the counterculture to the

mainstream

,” says Moreno.

The use (and perhaps abuse) of illegal substances among the new generations seems so normalized that it is even difficult to find mentions of it in some of the latest treatises on urban music that have arrived in Spain.

In

Making flow$.

Urban music: A generational change, a new cultural paradigm

(Plaza y Janés), signed by El Bloque, the song barely appears in its almost 400 pages, although there are mentions of key songs from the last decade, such as

Ex-Drugdealer

, performed by PXXR GVNG, where one hears: “How much you want?

I have coke, I have M”.

Or one of the greatest hits of this era,

Million Dollar Baby

, signed four-handed by Cecilio G and Marvin Cruz: “At 15 I sneaked into Razzmatazz / At 16 I sneaked into Sónar / Now Sónar pays me to sing / At 17 I did not stop taking drugs / I painted meters and stole Brugal / I am from the crazy street, I am not Bad Gyal”.

(The Catalan is not an upstart in these fights either, in one of her last hymns she proclaims herself as

Miss Marihuana

: “I smoke all the time / They ask me how I know how to roll with those nails / In the club we smoke hashish and marijuana / And the posh girls look at me reluctantly / Always wrapped in smoke‚ but I always smell Prada”).

More information

Cecilio G on glory, drugs and jail: “Being in prison is loneliness, like being in a cemetery.

It's worth it"

Within pop, artists like Alizzz mention the subject in their lyrics;

In the video for

El encuentro

, his duet with Amaia, the times of Valencian bakalao are recreated with a nostalgic air.

A moment that by the way appears these days represented in

La Ruta

, the Atresplayer Premium series that narrates the days of lag in which thousands of young people moved between Madrid and Valencia along the El Saler highway.

"We consider ourselves a psychoactive publisher," says Ezequiel Fanego, editor of Caja Negra.

Two of his latest titles enter fully into the question of consumption and its relationship with the social and the musical.

One is

Universal history of the after

, by Leo Felipe, and another,

Neon screams: How drill, trap and bashment made music new again

by Kit Mackintosh.

The first displays situations in which getting high, interacting and moving through different architectures is relevant and differentiating.

He says that cocaine is a key to the subconscious and relates it to psychoanalysis;

of ketamine that comments are mythologies, body without organs or rhizomes.

And he reflects: "The prohibitionist policies of the US and Europe were applied in other regions of the world, strengthening a chain of deaths, corruption and profit even though people have never stopped using drugs."

Mackintosh's essay underscores the drug's immense influence on the sales charts.

“They are central to the sleepy style of

mumble rap

, so much so that it feels as if the music is parasitically feeding off the energy (or perhaps more accurately, the litany) of America's opioid epidemic era.” , write.

Later, he affirms that "the rap of the nineties was the music of the

dealer

, while today's hip hop is the music of the addicts."

Stars of this music such as Young Thug, Lil Gotit, Future, Lil Baby, Travis Scott or Migos parade through its pages, among a multitude of Stakhanovists of smoke, powder and pills.

Bad Gyal, or 'Miss Marihuana', during a concert in São Paulo.

It is difficult to know what the direct effect of the normalization of drugs, legal or illegal, is on popular culture.

But there is consumption data.

According to the latest report from the Spanish Observatory on Drugs and Addictions, "the drugs with the highest prevalence of use in the Spanish population aged 15-64 are alcohol, tobacco and prescription or non-prescription hypnosedatives, followed by cannabis and cocaine".

He continues: “Alcohol continues to be the most consumed psychoactive substance.

77.2% have consumed alcohol in the last 12 months, 63% in the last 30 days and 8.8% daily in the last 30 days.

And it illustrates how cocaine use has increased: “10.9% of the population between 15 and 64 years of age have used powdered cocaine at some time, 2.5% in the last year and 1.1% in the last 30 days.

Mass platforms, harmful customs

A pink powder and a transparent plastic bag.

This is one of the ways in which the

tusi

is reflected in

Elite

, one of the series that has shown the most drug use among young people.

Also known as pink cocaine, it is part of what the Ministry of Health calls "new or emerging psychoactive substances, with effects similar to classic drugs, generally in a situation of legality."

About 400 new ones appear each year.

And novelty, you know, is always sexy.

Television knows it and reflects it.

In

Euphoria

(HBO Max), one of her protagonists, Rue (played by Zendaya), consumes fentanyl, a very high-risk synthetic opioid.

One of its derivatives, carfentanil, can be 10,000 times more potent than morphine.

(It is notable that Ben Westhoff, a specialist in rap and the different communities that were created in the southern United States, has also taken an interest in opioids at

Fentanyl, Inc.. How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic

, a book that explores the epidemic of these substances in the US).

In Spain, beyond

La Ruta

, the protagonists of

Cardo

, a series created by Ana Rujas and Claudia Costafreda, find themselves in a present so empty, precarious and lacking in possibilities that how can they not surrender to everything that allows them to forget?

Filmin's new original series,

Self

-Defense , plays with a similar approach.

However, the rise of illegal substances and alcohol among youth in fiction contrasts with the latest data.

Generation Z is the most sober in recent history and, according to data from the 2022 Report of the Spanish Observatory on Drugs and Addictions (OEDA), collected among young people between the ages of 14 and 18, almost all drugs (amphetamines, cocaine and cannabis , for example) have had a consumption habit in decline since 2004. Except for ecstasy, whose popularity since 2014 has not stopped increasing.

Frame from the series 'Elite' showing a bag with 'tusi', also called pink cocaine.

On the other hand, even if they try to avoid their connection, the relationship of affinity between reggaeton and the world of drugs is unavoidable.

“Most of the artists come from bullying.

They have no other, they don't know how to put food on the table”, describes Pablito Wilson, behind

Regueton, a Latin revolution

(Liburuak 01), who within the chapter dedicated to Anuel AA and J Álvarez — imprisoned for three years for heroin trafficking — analyzes the phenomenon: “Reggaeton is the main Latin

mainstream

music , born in the streets and closely connected to the criminal reality that happens in them.

It's a bit like a twist of fate, you can sweep it under the rug but it's always going to show up."

David Sucunza, responsible for

Drugs, Pharmaceuticals and Poisons

(Guadalmazán) recalls that drugs have not always had a glamorizing effect.

They haven't even always been illegal.

His book is an anecdote about the importance, relevance and value that many of these ancient anesthetics have today.

“If one reads literature from the 19th century, where mentions of laudanum or cocaine appear, he sees that they were legal, there was no cultural taboo against them.

It was a time when there were hardly any drugs to mitigate diseases”, confirms this chemist, a professor at the University of Alcalá.

Today, we still have time to find out if this new candor about substance use encourages it, mirrors it, or even caricatures it.

Possibly all at once.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-12-06

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