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1. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to examine the visual portrayal of heroin and methamphetamine (meth) users and reflect on how negative connotations with drug users might be fuelled by their visual representation in media and anti-drug campaigns. Films like Christiane F., Requiem of a Dream or Trainspotting tend to over-represent the image of the dirty “junkie”, with a belt on the upper arm and a needle in the other hand. The same process can be witnessed with the image of meth users, in which the mug shots of white skinny toothless faces are visible all over the internet, newspapers and television. Existing research argued 20 years ago that this standardised picture needs to be questioned (see De Ridder, 1991; Schmidt-Semisch, 1990; Schneider, 1996; Quensel, 1982). Nevertheless, the important role of the visual element for constituting beliefs about drug use and drug users is lacking in the current drug discourse. This work intends to close the existing gap and emphasise the harming consequences for drug consumers and the harm-reduction work produced by such visuality.
2. The importance of the visual
Seeing has, in our culture, become synonymous with understanding. We “look” at a problem. We “see” the point. We adopt a “viewpoint”. We “focus” on an issue. We “see things in perspective”. The world “as we see it” (rather than “as we know it”, and certainly not “as we hear it” or “as we feel it”) has become the measure of what is “real” and “true”
(Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 163).
Social scientists are increasingly interested in the process by which social life is constructed through the exchange and production of meanings between members of a society, or a group (Rose, 2012, p. 2). Stuart Hall (1997, p. 2) describes culture as being dependent “on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is around them, and ‘making sense’ of the world, in broadly similar ways”. Scholars argue that the visual is central for the cultural construction of social life in contemporary western societies (Berger, 1972; Boyd, 2002; Evans and Hall, 1999; Fyfe and Law, 1988; Hill and Helmers, 2004; Jenks, 1995; Kaszynski, 2016; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; Rose, 2012, p. 2). These days all sorts of visual technologies, like films and...