8 ms·

How TV dramas informed and misinformed perceptions of the war on drugs

82 points by hhs 5y ago

Lammy 5y ago
It's hard to top 7th Heaven S02E04 "Who Knew?" for melodrama about one joint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB24X05F0wI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB24X05F0wI
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The year is 2050. The final frontier in computer vision remains unsolved: is this VHS rip 4:3 or wide?
  - Lammy 5y ago
    Trick question: the transport for post-1986 TV shows is almost always anamorphic D-1, 704x480 pillarboxed to 720x480 :)
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  That's absolutely amazing. Based on some of the replies in that "war on drugs" thread yesterday, I think that dad might actually be a HNer.
  - dang_is_erect 5y ago
    The Hackers News is an extremely conservative place ;-)
- hef19898 5y ago
  Didn't they make a similar theatre about drinking coffee (Simon, if memory serves well, the blond brother). Disclaimer: I watched it back the day, procastrinating was made easier during afternoon instead of home work. Also, Jessica Biel.
  - dang_is_erect 5y ago
    Nice disclaimer!
- cbozeman 5y ago
  That is the dumbest shit I have ever seen. I'm so glad I was completely consumed with interest in computers and programming all throughout the 90s. I almost never watched television, and after watching this, I'm glad I didn't. It never fails to amaze me that people are stupid enough to believe a fictional program they watch, which even has disclaimers at the end of each program telling you its fictional. I'm sure someone with rush to the defense of these idiots and claim they're just "gullible" but I'm not sure that's better.
duxup 5y ago
I always have mixed feelings on if art influences society ... or it is just a representation of it. Particularly when it comes to getting eyeballs on TV, or a movie. People making that content are thinking about what people will want to watch. Does someone "glorified 'The Thin Blue Line'" (just picking a random bit from this article) because they saw it on TV... or is TV responding to what that person already thinks / wants to watch? It's super easy to think about other people who we don't share the same views with as: "Oh those people are just misinformed because X influence." But I'm not sure that's always the case.
- EarthIsHome 5y ago
  > I always have mixed feelings on if art influences society ... or it is just a representation of it. It's a little bit of both. There is a model of society called the "base and superstructure" [0]. The base comprises of the means of production as well as everyone's relationship to the means of production. Superstructures, like art and culture, are built on top of the base and are both shaped by the base as well as re-enforce the base. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  If someone tells you to imagine a cop, and you imagine a TV cop, that show has definitely influenced your worldview.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    I love cops, they're so funny and silly and always do the right™ thing. I literally will disgrace the national flag with my own version of it, and you know what? I'll even throw a punisher logo with a thin blue line, because you know, the punisher loved cops as much as I did. This whole damn nation was founded on respecting the authority and licking boots.
    - carapace 5y ago
      > This whole damn nation was founded on respecting the authority and licking boots. I think King George III might have a different take, eh?
pjc50 5y ago
Someone coined the phrase "copaganda" for this kind of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dirty Harry genre themes of police struggling bravely against those who would hold them accountable has contributed to the unusually high number of deaths caused by US police, and thus the riots of last year.
- newacct583 5y ago
  I dunno... I think this is just innate. And to be clear: I say this as an inveterate woke hippy and someone deeply distrustful of american police culture. People want heroes. Heroes need bad guys. People thus want bad guys and will celebrate the groups that oppose them as heroes. In the US we had heroes fighting japs and nazis, then commies (notably no one ever fought the confederates in pop culture...). But come the age of globalization in the 80's and especially after the collapse of the USSR, we just ran out of bad guys. So we made some up out of the junkies on the street. I mean, certainly there was crime in that world. And at the top it was organized. And there was real violence between cartels and dealers. Those were bad guys! Go get 'em, heroes! TV didn't do that. We did it to ourselves. TV just reflected what we all agreed on.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > notably no one ever fought the confederates in pop culture... That could be worth unpacking, that one. The confederacy get remarkably good treatment by comparison. I think there's maybe a couple of Westerns on the subject? By comparison there's a lot of films depicting them as misunderstood honorable victims of circumstances. Having watched a lot of bad 80s films in lockdown, it's remarkable how many post-apocalyptic settings look like New York if it was never cleaned up. The peak of course is Escape from new York
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    Well, if you don't have good guys and bad guys, then the government doesn't have the guise of your protection to justify its having and using monopoly of force. Also, I don't think _we_ need them, but narratives that justify the above do. Friends and Seinfeld didn't have heroes and bad guys.
hluska 5y ago
Years ago, a friend and I started a street paper in our city. A lot of our vendors had really serious addictions. The perception you would get about homeless/near homeless addicts from copaganda and the truth is remarkably far apart. My biggest take from a lot of those interactions was how much they're like tech founders. I swear that if one particular vendor had discovered a IIc instead of LSD in the mid-80s, every one of us on this site would know his name. Experiences like that really chip away at the "Thin Blue Line" narrative where these flawed people are our last line of defense against the degeneracy of drugs.
- tengbretson 5y ago
  > I swear that if one particular vendor had discovered a IIc instead of LSD in the mid-80s, every one of us on this site would know his name. I don't know if I'm missing the point here, but if this is true, then wouldn't it follow that drugs are something that society should be fighting against?
  - ksjdmddl 5y ago
    There are ways for society to fight against things besides criminalizing them
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    I would have preferred Zuckerberg doing LSD instead creating Facebook. Less harm would have come to society.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Assuming IIc is an Apple reference, I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs asked people if they did LSD during the interview and didn't hire them if they were squares.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      It's a confusing one for sure. I thought he meant "a 2c" as in "one of the 2c class of drugs" which are similar to LSD.
aww_dang 5y ago
The rationales for the war on drugs are now acceptable to question. It is worth remembering that questioning these rationales was considered heretical not long ago. When I've asked others about their views on debunked popular delusions, they often reply, "I always knew [insert premise] wasn't true". If as many people disbelieved these premises as self-report post-debunking, the premise would have never been popular. Media outlets would have never sold the rationale. The important feature of propaganda, is that you are not aware that it is propaganda. Therefore, it is worth looking at current promotions and examining currently held beliefs. Even if we arrive at the eventuality of a full end to the drug war, if all non-violent offenders are released - We still can't give those people their lives back. A self-righteous retrospective won't put the pieces back together. What are the current mythologies the presses are selling and how do they impact civil liberties? https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1010335 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101033...
- jeffbee 5y ago
  I think the American press is implicated in widespread delusions about dispersed patterns of settlement and car mobility. Many newspaper and TV networks are funded significantly by car makers and real estate agents, so they have a self-interest in not examining whether it's nonsense to build and move around the way we do. I think in the near future it will be obvious, at least to younger people, that everyone having a little detached house and two cars is pure nonsense. I imagine the birth year gradient of this perception will be similarly steep to the one seen for views of homosexuality and recreational marijuana.
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    A single person can operate in most suburban areas with only a bicycle. I'm not convinced the objections I've heard can be related to media consumption.
    - reidjs 5y ago
      As a single man, I would personally be miserable if I lived in the suburbs without a car. Maybe we have very different ideas of what suburban means, but I have a few questions: How are they meeting new people? I've never seen a suburb with a nightlife or quality restaurants. How are they dating? Do they invite people over on the first date? Where are they buying their groceries? I understand the desire to have space if you're raising a family, but I can't understand why a single person would willingly live in the suburbs and choose not to own a car.
Uhhrrr 5y ago
I'm surprised this article didn't mention direct government subsidies for shows with anti-drug storylines: https://www.salon.com/2000/01/13/drugs_6/ https://www.salon.com/2000/01/13/drugs_6/
hindsightbias 5y ago
I can’t even watch tv. The law and order, ncis, swat, seal, whatever - it’s just completely pervasive in society now. Even the BBC productions that used to be thinking and clever Inspectors now always have some gun battle. Hollywood is as liberal as the NRA wants it.
- namdnay 5y ago
  To be fair to the BBC, their biggest police drama is about bent coppers
  - querulous 5y ago
    yeah but they're the supervillian/shadow conspiracy kind of bent cops where almost all the cops who do bad things are good people who get manipulated into doing bad by criminal masterminds. and the "good" cops commit abuses just as bad as the "bad" cops
    - pjc50 5y ago
      The final episode of S7 had so many references to real UK police corruption it was practically a speech to camera. You could tell it hit home by the number of complaints about it on Twitter. Timely for the Daniel Taylor findings.
- dang_is_erect2 5y ago
  Life is hard for boomers on the hackers news! My teevee! Grumble grumble
- Matticus_Rex 5y ago
  This is hardly the NRA's big agenda. Not a lot of law-abiding gun owners shown in these shows; just people who use them for work in alarming ways.
mistermann 5y ago
Rather than (or in addition to) having typical casual forum discussions about yet another example of <x>, I think it would be a useful exercise for humanity to start a crowd sourced initiative to start assembling a singular, comprehensive, authoritative (as an eventual goal) list of things that humanity does at scale that contribute to the complex chain of (largely unknown/unrealized) causality that produces sub-optimal outcomes in shared physical reality. Doing this perfectly would not be easy, but I suspect perfection is not an absolute requirement.
j_m_b 5y ago
The bad news: Propaganda in media is way more pervasive than it was back in the 80-90s. The good news: It's laughably obvious.
aaron695 5y ago
TV is probably why our IQ rose for decades. It's hours a day training. Unfortunately before zombies drugs were a easy way to hurt people without remorse. Added bonus easy storylines. Hollywood being a drug mecca knew what they were doing. You can still see in this article the heavy Hollywood influence. They are treading carefully and probably don't even know why.
closeparen 5y ago
It really ought to be more humbling than it is, just how much popular and progressive moral authority was lined up behind temperance and Prohibition the first time. I understand now we have the narrative that the war on drugs was an explicit ploy of oppression but I have to believe that it was at least helped along by the same feature of our psyches that gave us the 1920s.
danielschonfeld 5y ago
Is it going to take 20-30 more years for the same kind of articles to be made on the war on terror and our portrayal of 9/11 and everything surrounding it, until we finally wake up and realize it was a story sold to us?

82 points by hhs 5y ago

It's hard to top 7th Heaven S02E04 "Who Knew?" for melodrama about one joint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB24X05F0wI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB24X05F0wI

jeffbee 5y ago
The year is 2050. The final frontier in computer vision remains unsolved: is this VHS rip 4:3 or wide?
- Lammy 5y ago
  Trick question: the transport for post-1986 TV shows is almost always anamorphic D-1, 704x480 pillarboxed to 720x480 :)
seattle_spring 5y ago
That's absolutely amazing. Based on some of the replies in that "war on drugs" thread yesterday, I think that dad might actually be a HNer.
- dang_is_erect 5y ago
  The Hackers News is an extremely conservative place ;-)
hef19898 5y ago
Didn't they make a similar theatre about drinking coffee (Simon, if memory serves well, the blond brother). Disclaimer: I watched it back the day, procastrinating was made easier during afternoon instead of home work. Also, Jessica Biel.
- dang_is_erect 5y ago
  Nice disclaimer!
cbozeman 5y ago
That is the dumbest shit I have ever seen. I'm so glad I was completely consumed with interest in computers and programming all throughout the 90s. I almost never watched television, and after watching this, I'm glad I didn't. It never fails to amaze me that people are stupid enough to believe a fictional program they watch, which even has disclaimers at the end of each program telling you its fictional. I'm sure someone with rush to the defense of these idiots and claim they're just "gullible" but I'm not sure that's better.

duxup 5y ago

I always have mixed feelings on if art influences society ... or it is just a representation of it. Particularly when it comes to getting eyeballs on TV, or a movie. People making that content are thinking about what people will want to watch. Does someone "glorified 'The Thin Blue Line'" (just picking a random bit from this article) because they saw it on TV... or is TV responding to what that person already thinks / wants to watch? It's super easy to think about other people who we don't share the same views with as: "Oh those people are just misinformed because X influence." But I'm not sure that's always the case.

EarthIsHome 5y ago
> I always have mixed feelings on if art influences society ... or it is just a representation of it. It's a little bit of both. There is a model of society called the "base and superstructure" [0]. The base comprises of the means of production as well as everyone's relationship to the means of production. Superstructures, like art and culture, are built on top of the base and are both shaped by the base as well as re-enforce the base. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
spywaregorilla 5y ago
If someone tells you to imagine a cop, and you imagine a TV cop, that show has definitely influenced your worldview.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  I love cops, they're so funny and silly and always do the right™ thing. I literally will disgrace the national flag with my own version of it, and you know what? I'll even throw a punisher logo with a thin blue line, because you know, the punisher loved cops as much as I did. This whole damn nation was founded on respecting the authority and licking boots.
  - carapace 5y ago
    > This whole damn nation was founded on respecting the authority and licking boots. I think King George III might have a different take, eh?

pjc50 5y ago

Someone coined the phrase "copaganda" for this kind of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dirty Harry genre themes of police struggling bravely against those who would hold them accountable has contributed to the unusually high number of deaths caused by US police, and thus the riots of last year.

newacct583 5y ago
I dunno... I think this is just innate. And to be clear: I say this as an inveterate woke hippy and someone deeply distrustful of american police culture. People want heroes. Heroes need bad guys. People thus want bad guys and will celebrate the groups that oppose them as heroes. In the US we had heroes fighting japs and nazis, then commies (notably no one ever fought the confederates in pop culture...). But come the age of globalization in the 80's and especially after the collapse of the USSR, we just ran out of bad guys. So we made some up out of the junkies on the street. I mean, certainly there was crime in that world. And at the top it was organized. And there was real violence between cartels and dealers. Those were bad guys! Go get 'em, heroes! TV didn't do that. We did it to ourselves. TV just reflected what we all agreed on.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > notably no one ever fought the confederates in pop culture... That could be worth unpacking, that one. The confederacy get remarkably good treatment by comparison. I think there's maybe a couple of Westerns on the subject? By comparison there's a lot of films depicting them as misunderstood honorable victims of circumstances. Having watched a lot of bad 80s films in lockdown, it's remarkable how many post-apocalyptic settings look like New York if it was never cleaned up. The peak of course is Escape from new York
- reedjosh 5y ago
  Well, if you don't have good guys and bad guys, then the government doesn't have the guise of your protection to justify its having and using monopoly of force. Also, I don't think _we_ need them, but narratives that justify the above do. Friends and Seinfeld didn't have heroes and bad guys.

hluska 5y ago

Years ago, a friend and I started a street paper in our city. A lot of our vendors had really serious addictions. The perception you would get about homeless/near homeless addicts from copaganda and the truth is remarkably far apart. My biggest take from a lot of those interactions was how much they're like tech founders. I swear that if one particular vendor had discovered a IIc instead of LSD in the mid-80s, every one of us on this site would know his name. Experiences like that really chip away at the "Thin Blue Line" narrative where these flawed people are our last line of defense against the degeneracy of drugs.

tengbretson 5y ago
> I swear that if one particular vendor had discovered a IIc instead of LSD in the mid-80s, every one of us on this site would know his name. I don't know if I'm missing the point here, but if this is true, then wouldn't it follow that drugs are something that society should be fighting against?
- ksjdmddl 5y ago
  There are ways for society to fight against things besides criminalizing them
- pope_meat 5y ago
  I would have preferred Zuckerberg doing LSD instead creating Facebook. Less harm would have come to society.
- astrange 5y ago
  Assuming IIc is an Apple reference, I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs asked people if they did LSD during the interview and didn't hire them if they were squares.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    It's a confusing one for sure. I thought he meant "a 2c" as in "one of the 2c class of drugs" which are similar to LSD.

aww_dang 5y ago

The rationales for the war on drugs are now acceptable to question. It is worth remembering that questioning these rationales was considered heretical not long ago. When I've asked others about their views on debunked popular delusions, they often reply, "I always knew [insert premise] wasn't true". If as many people disbelieved these premises as self-report post-debunking, the premise would have never been popular. Media outlets would have never sold the rationale. The important feature of propaganda, is that you are not aware that it is propaganda. Therefore, it is worth looking at current promotions and examining currently held beliefs. Even if we arrive at the eventuality of a full end to the drug war, if all non-violent offenders are released - We still can't give those people their lives back. A self-righteous retrospective won't put the pieces back together. What are the current mythologies the presses are selling and how do they impact civil liberties? https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1010335 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101033...

jeffbee 5y ago
I think the American press is implicated in widespread delusions about dispersed patterns of settlement and car mobility. Many newspaper and TV networks are funded significantly by car makers and real estate agents, so they have a self-interest in not examining whether it's nonsense to build and move around the way we do. I think in the near future it will be obvious, at least to younger people, that everyone having a little detached house and two cars is pure nonsense. I imagine the birth year gradient of this perception will be similarly steep to the one seen for views of homosexuality and recreational marijuana.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  A single person can operate in most suburban areas with only a bicycle. I'm not convinced the objections I've heard can be related to media consumption.
  - reidjs 5y ago
    As a single man, I would personally be miserable if I lived in the suburbs without a car. Maybe we have very different ideas of what suburban means, but I have a few questions: How are they meeting new people? I've never seen a suburb with a nightlife or quality restaurants. How are they dating? Do they invite people over on the first date? Where are they buying their groceries? I understand the desire to have space if you're raising a family, but I can't understand why a single person would willingly live in the suburbs and choose not to own a car.

Uhhrrr 5y ago

I'm surprised this article didn't mention direct government subsidies for shows with anti-drug storylines: https://www.salon.com/2000/01/13/drugs_6/ https://www.salon.com/2000/01/13/drugs_6/

hindsightbias 5y ago

I can’t even watch tv. The law and order, ncis, swat, seal, whatever - it’s just completely pervasive in society now. Even the BBC productions that used to be thinking and clever Inspectors now always have some gun battle. Hollywood is as liberal as the NRA wants it.

namdnay 5y ago
To be fair to the BBC, their biggest police drama is about bent coppers
- querulous 5y ago
  yeah but they're the supervillian/shadow conspiracy kind of bent cops where almost all the cops who do bad things are good people who get manipulated into doing bad by criminal masterminds. and the "good" cops commit abuses just as bad as the "bad" cops
  - pjc50 5y ago
    The final episode of S7 had so many references to real UK police corruption it was practically a speech to camera. You could tell it hit home by the number of complaints about it on Twitter. Timely for the Daniel Taylor findings.
dang_is_erect2 5y ago
Life is hard for boomers on the hackers news! My teevee! Grumble grumble
Matticus_Rex 5y ago
This is hardly the NRA's big agenda. Not a lot of law-abiding gun owners shown in these shows; just people who use them for work in alarming ways.

mistermann 5y ago

Rather than (or in addition to) having typical casual forum discussions about yet another example of <x>, I think it would be a useful exercise for humanity to start a crowd sourced initiative to start assembling a singular, comprehensive, authoritative (as an eventual goal) list of things that humanity does at scale that contribute to the complex chain of (largely unknown/unrealized) causality that produces sub-optimal outcomes in shared physical reality. Doing this perfectly would not be easy, but I suspect perfection is not an absolute requirement.

j_m_b 5y ago

The bad news: Propaganda in media is way more pervasive than it was back in the 80-90s. The good news: It's laughably obvious.

aaron695 5y ago

TV is probably why our IQ rose for decades. It's hours a day training. Unfortunately before zombies drugs were a easy way to hurt people without remorse. Added bonus easy storylines. Hollywood being a drug mecca knew what they were doing. You can still see in this article the heavy Hollywood influence. They are treading carefully and probably don't even know why.

closeparen 5y ago

It really ought to be more humbling than it is, just how much popular and progressive moral authority was lined up behind temperance and Prohibition the first time. I understand now we have the narrative that the war on drugs was an explicit ploy of oppression but I have to believe that it was at least helped along by the same feature of our psyches that gave us the 1920s.

danielschonfeld 5y ago

Is it going to take 20-30 more years for the same kind of articles to be made on the war on terror and our portrayal of 9/11 and everything surrounding it, until we finally wake up and realize it was a story sold to us?