Drugstore Cowboy Film Analysis - Essay Example

In “Drugstore Cowboy” the weakness of the hero is drugs. The film as the title indicates is on drug abuse, but is not a “say no to drug” sort of a slogan mongering publicity campaign film. The film tells us about the generation of the early seventies who took to drugs. But the film produced in late eighties tells the story of the life of that generation of the seventies when America was almost obsessed with anti drug sentiment bordering on the verge of hysteria. The late eighties were the times of the winners.

Only they counted. But this film is telling us about the losers belonging to the generation just earlier, who got lost in drugs and unreal hallucinatory lives. The film tries to understand that generation, while showing how comically meaningless and desperate the life of the addicts were. The border between medicine and drug is wafer thin. The change of meaning is only in how the human beings relate to it. Like drug abuse there is abuse of medicines; this is an issue raised by the traditional medical practitioners like the Ayurvedic doctors against Allopathic practices.

To quote Angus Bancroft: A drug is a substance used in a drug-like way, a medicine is the substance applied to cure, and a poison the substance used to kill. The end point is that any object or relationship to an object is only formed by the way humans relate to it. Psychoactive substances become ‘drug’ only when they take on socially active characteristics, which incorporate human agency. (Drug Intoxication & Society, PP.176) PERSONEL BUT IMPASSIONATE: The film is based on the unpublished novel by James Fogle.

This writer is one who had served imprisonment for drug abuse crimes. Thus the account of the life of the drug addict depicted here is very intimate and personal. It is something like an insider story. But the positive feature of the film’s handling of the issue is that it is not romanticizing drug addiction, in spite of it being an insider narrative. At the same