97: Drugs on TV

It isn't just PSAs with our brains as a fried egg. Sometimes it's Euphoria's Mouse, a Latino drug dealer with face tattoos who forces a young girl to take fentanyl at knifepoint. Other times it's reruns of Robert Downey Jr. in Less than Zero, or Tupac and Tim Roth in Gridlock'd—characters suffering the predictable consequences of using heroin in the movies: their lives falling apart. But always on our televisions we are given a single story about drugs and those who use & sell them: failure and destruction.

Media teach us things. We learn from what we see on screen, even if we know it isn't true. In this episode I talk about drugs on TV and in movies, and I unpack the way we learn things from the films we watch, even though we know they aren't real or true. 

Bill Yousman's work related to media, prison and learning is available here.
You can check out bell hooks' work related to media studies in her book Reel to Real.

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