There many different drug films that have been made to represent them in todays society. To name a few there is Human Traffic which is a little known British film that was made in 1999 Directored by Justin Kerrigan, Producer Emer McCourt and Alain Niblio and Cinematography by Dave Bennett, which is about a group of friends looking forward to a hard weekend of party beer and drugs at Cardiff.
They represent drugs as safe to use when partying at the weekend and feel you should have the freedom to them if you want to. The main drugs discussed in the film in ecstasy and follows the events of 5 friends looking forward to the weekend of euphoria to paranoia. In one scene there is the main character jip and one of this friends sitting at a desk in a classroom style room with a professor at the front with a blackboard and a skeleton and a long stick. In this scene they discuss the advantages and disadvantages of taking the drug, because you always have to have a balanced debate and look at it from both points of view. They also went into the debate of how more people die from beer than ecstasy but let beer be legal because its a more profitable drug.
In another scene their is a clip showing you what it is like to be on the drug. They took many shots of them partying in the crowd with close ups, so with the power of editing they presented each person individually, and edited the close ups of them in the crowd at the party, so that there was only a white screen behind them, so all the focus of the audience goes on the character and not behind them. They then put voice overs on the clip to tell you what the character is feeling at this present time. Here is a clip of on YouTube i found from the film Human Traffic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fezud1HC-bk
So Human traffic gives a balanced statement on the advantages and disadvantages of drug use.
Another film is trainspotting which was made in 1996 directored by Danny Boyle that takes place in Scotland with a cast of people like Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle and Johnny Lee Miller, gives a detailed overview on heroin addiction and how it affects the body physically and mentally.
In this film there is scenes where ranton jack's up then his body falls to the floor when he feels something. It tries to represent in the scene what he is feeling, and by doing this in one scene his body srinks into the floor, it doesn't actually physically do that, but they wanted to represent what he was feeling at the time, so they can properly represent this drug in the film and the effects it has on the body. In another scene there is ranton who is in his room in his bed, and he is getting withdrawal symptons which is a disadvantage of taking the drug, again it is giving a balanced debate like in human traffic. There is a baby that is crawling across his ceiling towards him, agian it actually isnt really there, but because one side effect of this drug is withdrawal and you start to see things, again representing how the can drug affect the body.
Another good film is Requiem for a Dream which was made in 2000 and is a adaptation of the 1978 novel. This concentrates on Valium and how this can affect the body. The film goes into detailed depth of different forms of addiction. The main focus on a drugs film is to educate the audience of drugs what they do and how they affect the body whether it be good or bad. This film gives acurate information on how people can lose themselves to drugs if they aren't incontrol of their own life, eventually slipping away from reality as the days go on. Two other doos films are layer cake and traffic.
Kyle Corfield - JMK Productions