The Aesthetics of the Underworld: The Western Drug Problem

Abstract

From a semiotic point of view, the portrayed effects of drugs on the user signify something more than the actual effects they have. The most obvious sense in which this is true is a medical one. For example, on Geoffrey Robertson's Hypothetical ('What's Your Poison?' 30 September 1987), a representative of the Merseyside council in England and an Australian pharmacologist claimed that pure regulated doses of heroin had less effect on one's professional performance than alcohol. This is a far cry from popular perceptions of the drug's effect on the user. However, it is not medical signification that concerns me here. Rather, I wish to show that 'drugs' signify beyond themselves an aesthetic dimension, not just for the conservative readers of lurid horror drug stories, but also for the young future users of these chemicals.