ABSTRACT
The 2014 season finale of the popular NBC show The Blacklist shows its main character, Raymond Reddington, sharing a bottle of vodka with his long-standing enemy, Berlin, while the two discuss the death of another character earlier in the episode. As the Russian villain downs the last drop, Reddington takes out a gun and shoots him dead. Most episodes of the AMC show Mad Men feature characters drinking cocktails, which are so common on the show that its official website offers a “cocktail guide” (“Cocktail Guide,” n.d.); some analysts believe the show has contributed significantly to a resurgence of the “cocktail culture” in the United States (Olmsted, 2012). Mad Men characters are also among the most popular of the declining share of TV characters who smoke cigarettes (Dealer, 2014). In the 2014 movie Lucy, Scarlett Johansson plays the title character, a woman forced by a drug lord to have a bag containing a dangerous synthetic drug surgically implanted into her abdomen; the plan is that she will serve as a “mule,” delivering the drug to Europe. But when the drug leaks into her system, Lucy gains enhanced mental and physical capabilities, essentially becoming superhuman. A 2009 episode of the animated program Family Guy features Brian, a talking dog, getting caught in possession of marijuana and becoming an activist for legalization. The show features a musical number called
“Everything’s Better With a Bag of Weed.” Marijuana, once associated primarily with rock and rap music, is now mentioned with increasing frequency through casual and mostly positive references in countrywestern music (Maddux, 2013). Beyond the depiction of both negative and positive characters using tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and other drugs, what these examples have in common is that (with the exception of Lucy, perhaps) none is especially dramatic. The visual or verbal references to substance use appear, for the most part, in passing; they are not necessarily central to the narrative or presented as being unusual in any way. In entertainment media, the use of alcohol and other substances is often presented as normal or, at the very least, to be expected. Even the most critical observers of these depictions do not argue that the writers and producers of entertainment media intend to encourage substance use or abuse by making the behaviors seem more common or normative. However, the research shows that these depictions can have unintended consequences; when substance use is portrayed more frequently among media characters, real-life substance use tends to increase (Engels et al., 2009; Jamieson & Romer, 2014; Koordeman et al., 2012; Primack et al., 2009; Sargent, 2005). This chapter examines the research documenting those effects.
