Cocaine Fiends And Reefer Madness

From the very beginning, filmmakers have struggled to free themselves from censorship and manipulation by special-interest groups, and this struggle is clearly evident in the history of drug films. Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness is an exhaustive exploration of the history of the depiction of psychoactive drugs in motion pictures from Thomas Edison's Opium Smoker (1894) to Cocaine Cowboys (1978), Included are over 400 silent and 1,000 sound films as well as nearly 500 drug-abuse films, 85 experimental films, and 135 television programs. More than 150 stills, most never before published and many extremely rare, illustrate the text. Arranged chronologically as well as by drug type and often by country, this book shows that, far from being a recent phenomenon, drug films were made in nearly every country and period that produced a significant body of films. Visit Edison's first film studio, reflect on the filmic consequences of Cocteau's opium addiction with Kenneth Anger's early experiences with magic mushrooms, see Charles Laughton smuggling cocaine inside a statute of the Buddha, and watch Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., consuming vast quantities of opium and cocaine in a World War I Sherlock Holmes parody.

Contains contributions on the theme of popular culture, crime, and social control. This title includes chapters that tease out various criminologically relevant issues, pertaining to crime/deviance and/or the control thereof, on the basis of an analysis of various aspects and manifestations of popular culture, including music, and movies.

In Hooked in Film, John Markert takes a close look at the correlation between social policies and the public view of drugs and their portrayals in film. In this volume, Markert examines the changing social attitudes toward illegal drugs and their cinematic depictions from as early as the 1894 film Chinese Opium Den to the present. Tracking hundreds of films spanning more than a century, Hooked in Film looks at camp classics like Reefer Madness, comedies such as Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, Dazed and Confused, and Pineapple Express, and dramas, including Panic in Needle Park and Requiem for a Dream. Scholars and students of cinema, popular culture, media studies, and sociology will find this book a valuable examination of how cinematic portrayals of drugs have changed over time, and how those images have influenced public perception of drugs and even public policy.

Now synonymous with Sixties counterculture, LSD actually entered the American consciousness via the mainstream. Time and Life, messengers of lumpen-American respectability, trumpeted its grand arrival in a postwar landscape scoured of alluring descriptions of drug use while outlets across the media landscape piggybacked on their coverage with stories by turns sensationalized and glowing. Acid Hype offers the untold tale of LSD's wild journey from Brylcreem and Ivory soap to incense and peppermints. As Stephen Siff shows, the early attention lavished on the drug by the news media glorified its use in treatments for mental illness but also its status as a mystical--yet legitimate--gateway to exploring the unconscious mind. Siff's history takes readers to the center of how popular media hyped psychedelic drugs in a constantly shifting legal and social environment, producing an intricate relationship between drugs and media experience that came to define contemporary pop culture. It also traces how the breathless coverage of LSD gave way to a textbook moral panic, transforming yesterday's refined seeker of truths into an acid casualty splayed out beyond the fringe of polite society.

This work uncovers the history of women and addiction in America and how dependent women have been treated. The author is critical of doctors who have often been quick to prescribe narcotics to female patients.

In this important contribution to the study of drugs and addiction Illana Mountian critically analyses discourses surrounding drugs, drug treatment, and drug prevention, and develops alternative conceptual and methodological perspectives to current psychological approaches to drug use.

The four volumes of Film Study include a fresh approach to each of the basic categories in the original edition. Volume one examines the film as film; volume two focuses on the thematic approach to film; volume three draws on the history of film; and volume four contains extensive appendices listing film distributors, sources, and historical information as well as an index of authors, titles, and film personalities.