ABSTRACT
On March 1962, a special program on drug abuse was broadcast on ORTF, France’s official television channel. Entitled La Minute de Vérité, the focus of the program was a lengthy interview with an elderly woman. She talked about her life as an opiate addict; an addiction she had developed during a stay in hospital, when, according to her recollection, she was administered morphine to combat her pain. Afterwards, she became addicted to pharmaceutical opiates (palfium and paregoric elixir), barbiturates obtained through complacent medical prescription or bought over the counter. Some details about the origin of her addiction were underlined by the staging of the interview: her weakness, her apathy, and her loneliness, as she was without a husband who might have taken care of her and saved her from addiction (INA 1962). In this gendered narrative, the woman was portrayed as a childish person lacking responsibility, a particular stereotype to be deconstructed, all the more so as she was presented as a ‘typical’ case of drug addiction.
