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Editor:
How much are you really in control of your thoughts and habits?
Much has been made of the recent drug crisis in eastern Ohio over the last few years and there is now very little room to deny that there is a major trend. Many people look at the financial implications and the massive availability of these drugs as the driving force behind this fast expanding trend. However, I would like to propose another explanation for this boom in drug consumption, this being our entertainment outlets.
It may seem like a naive thought to believe that what people watch and expose themselves to could cause such an outbreak especially with such dangerous substances. However, this is not the first time this has happened. If we think back to the ’50s and ’60s when cigarette smoking became extremely prominent, it was largely a result of movies and television portraying the “coolest” and most interesting characters as smokers. James Dean is one of the most prominent examples from this era.
The same exact fad resulted from similar portrayals of weed in the early 2000’s with movies/shows such as Harold and Kumar, Cheech and Chong, That ’70s Show, Dude Where’s My Car, and many more.
If you pay close attention today the most popular shows on TV are hour long dramatic sagas. It doesn’t matter if you watch cable, HBO, or Netflix you see shows such as Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, House, Narcos, and many more. Even many recent movies such as Wolf of Wall Street have a similar premise. One thing all of these extremely popular shows have in common is that they have very charismatic, interesting characters that people believe to be someone they want to imitate. These characters make the use of these drugs such as heroin, cocaine, meth, and prescription drugs to look very glamorous, tough, and even “cool” excuse the cliched term.
You may be saying that you don’t believe that just watching TV can get someone into drugs and addictions that serious, however you have to understand that the majority of our opinions and what we deem as “model behavior” or “in style” comes almost entirely from media exposure. This brings up a very volatile and debatably impossible to solve situation.
We cannot place all the blame on the media because they have the right to place what they want out there for viewing and the people watching it do control their own actions.
This begs the question: Is there even a solution to this problem? Is it even possible to reprogram society when we are constantly comparing our real lives to those we see on TV, whether consciously or subconsciously?
When you look at how heavily bombarded this young generation has been their entire lives with media it becomes very hard to separate what truly is “free will” and what has been programmed into our head since we can remember.
Josh Lyder
Lisbon