MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Drugs are quintessentially cultural substances. They are cultural in the sense that they are contextually specific, but also in the sense that they are complex, overdetermined, evolving, and at the same time, semiotic: they are implicated in meaning making. Because culture is the terrain of hegemony, drugs are also ideological. They are ideological both in the sense that they are marked by the forms of power wielded by social superiors—those drugs that are legal are the drugs of the ruling classes—and in the sense that the forms of experience they open onto more readily allow the negotiation, questioning, playing with, and otherwise modifying of the very things that constitute ideology—the values, practices, beliefs, judgements, and ideas that help us understand ourselves, our world, and what we ought to do in it. This understanding of drugs enables us to subject them to the tools of critical cultural analysis, to tell better stories about drugs and about ourselves.

This essay takes up the popular television series Nurse Jackie alongside journalistic accounts of the ongoing Opiate Crisis to understand the ways that ‘drugs’ circulate in the popular imaginary. In particular, the essay traces the ways the signifier ‘drugs’ articulates an entire economy of pain and pleasure that helps stabilize and secure the hegemonic status quo. In this essay, I focus on the ways the tropes of the drug and drug use reify dominant notions of femininity, motherhood, masculinity, and neoliberal individuality. I close with the suggestion that the concept of the pharmakon, from which we derive the concept of the drug, offers promise for rearticulating our drug stories to craft better stories and better social realities in the future.