The 1988 Show
11
years pass, how is it that identity is maintained? Mind and behavior are
lofty notions, abstract ideas about apparently immaterial things that
constitute who we are. But there are, of course, physical ways to alter
them. And 1988 is, in fact, the year that two important narcotics went
into wide release that some would argue challenge the continuity of
identity no matter how it is defined.
In January of 1988, the New York City police department held a
press conference in which they discussed a dangerous new drug that had
appeared in the city and seemed to be growing in popularity. Though the
drug had gone by many different street names, the NYPD called it
“crack,” and the name stuck. Physiologically, crack cocaine is a chemical
that causes massive amounts of dopamine to be released in the brain,
thus creating a euphoria that typically lasts five-to-ten minutes. Without
immediate further use, however, dopamine levels fall far below even
normal range, thus—somewhat ironically—initiating a deep depression.
Interestingly, depression is the illness that the second major drug
of 1988 was meant to combat, as it was, coincidentally, also in January
of that year that the FDA gave its approval to Eli Lilly to begin
marketing Prozac. Prozac is a triple reuptake inhibitor—a drug that, in
part, blocks the breakdown of dopamine in the brain, thus keeping levels
high: the same end goal as crack, but, one hopes, with safer methods and
side-effects. By the end of 1988, Prozac was a cultural pharmacological
phenomenon and had brought in a record $350 million in profit for Eli
Lilly. Though crack has been in countless movies since its introduction
to the streets, it strangely took Hollywood 25 years to make a movie that
centered on the question of whether or not we are still ourselves when on
antidepressants. For better or for worse, this is one of the main themes of
Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013). Can a medicine make us sleep
walk through life and turn into a different person? Or might we not even
truly be the people we seem to be in the first place? Identity, Soderbergh
seems to be arguing, is never stable, whether chemically altered or not.
The person you love might not be the person you think he or she is at all.
Apart from the question of whether or not we are still ourselves
when taking mood-altering chemicals, there is a further social and
political point that crack and Prozac have in common. Prozac, especially
before it had a generic form available, was prescribed almost exclusively
to the white upper-class. And crack, though chemically identical to the
powdered cocaine used mostly by white Americans, was criminalized
and pursued more doggedly by law enforcement due, at least in part, to
the fact that it was used almost exclusively by poor African Americans.