Hooked in Film by John Markert

Author:John Markert [Markert, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Transitioning to the New Millennium: Social and Cinematic Concerns, 1990 to 2010

Regular use of cocaine rose to an all-time high in the early 1980s. In 1979, 4.8 percent of those aged twelve or older reported using cocaine in the past year; by 1982 this had climbed to 5.6 percent, where it remained only slightly abated three years later (5.1 percent in 1988; see table 4.1). It started to decrease by the end of the 1980s and continued a downward trajectory through the first decade of the new millennium, when it reached an all-time low of just under 2 percent of the population.

The sharp increase in the first half of the 1980s justified political and social concerns about cocaine. Much of the public furor surrounded the introduction of crack cocaine that suddenly appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the mid-1980s. The crack “epidemic” was the focus of considerable media attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s, though it was never a widely consumed drug—at its peak (1988 and 1997), crack was used on average by only slightly more than one-half of 1 percent (0.625) of the population. But crack cocaine dramatically altered the perception of the cocaine user. Powder cocaine was typically associated with recreational use by affluent whites; crack was more often publically framed as a black, “ghetto” drug and associated with criminal activity. This made crack more threatening to mainstream Americans. These changes prompted a concomitant increase in the number of films assessing cocaine as the old millennium (1990–1999) transitioned to the new (2000–2010).

There were a total of 35 films between 1960 and 1989 that depicted cocaine. The paucity of films in the 1980s that addressed cocaine as the “epidemic” spread across the social landscape is largely owing to the production lag: There is anywhere from a three- to five-year lag before a topic begins to percolate through society and the first films critiquing the social ill begin to appear in movie houses, which is why we started seeing more films negatively assess cocaine as the decade drew to a close, compared to the first half of the decade. This cultural lag helps explain the reason for the sharp rise in films addressing cocaine that began to appear in the 1990s. Forty-two films depicting cocaine were made in the last decade of the twentieth century, and because crack had been introduced in 1985, many of these early 1990s films addressed the new crack cocaine phenomenon. By the first decade of the new millennium, cocaine films had taken root and jumped nearly threefold to 113 films, even as cocaine was becoming less of a social issue. Criminal activity associated with cocaine garnered a fair amount of attention: 16 percent focused on some aspect of cocaine as an illegal enterprise, pitting law enforcement against those who used, manufactured, or sold powder cocaine, and another 12 percent specifically assessed the problem of crack cocaine among inner-city residents. Another large category of film is the true-life story, which accounted for nearly 20

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