Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting gave audiences one of the most memorable images of heroin addiction in cinema. The main protagonist, Mark Renton, desperate to retrieve drugs after losing them in a nightclub, plunges into a filthy public toilet. What follows is almost grotesque; he dives into the toilet itself and emerges into an underwater world in search of drugs that have disappeared beneath the filth.1
The scene is more than just shock value. The toilet itself becomes a symbol of the degradation caused by addiction. Renton is willing to abandon hygiene, his dignity, and even the boundaries of what society considers acceptable in order to retrieve a substance. In short, his priorities have been inverted. The drug, rather than the person, has become the centre of his world.
Yet, what makes Trainspotting particularly interesting is that the film does not begin with this degradation. Before addiction becomes disgusting and destructive, it can appear exciting. This is a very important distinction when considering why recreational drugs easily become culturally attractive, especially to young people. Drug use is not always introduced as something scary or dangerous. It can be dressed up to be rebellious, sophisticated, adventurous, or even 'cool', or even a necessary element to an aesthetic. The danger is not necessarily that people do not know that drugs can be harmful; it is that the culture surrounding drugs can make those consequences feel distant. I am sure that you, the reader, have indulged in something you knew was not necessarily good for you. Maybe you have stayed up later than you should have, eaten something you knew would make you feel awful, or had one more drink despite knowing you would regret it in the morning. We are remarkably good at separating an action from its consequences.
Drugs are no different in this respect. The problem begins when the behaviour becomes so culturally familiar that the risk no longer feels instantaneous. A teenager may know that cocaine is addictive, that heroin can kill, or that excessive drug use can fundamentally alter a person’s life, yet still associate the act of taking drugs with confidence, rebellion, aesthetics, social status, or belonging. Knowing that something is dangerous and feeling that it is dangerous are not necessarily the same thing.
As we have found, this is not a uniquely modern phenomenon.
Victorian Britain provides an interesting historical example. During the nineteenth century, opium was widely available through chemists and was commonly used in medicines, such as laudanum. Cocaine, cannabis, mescal, and, following the invention of the hypodermic needle, morphine and heroin were also present in Victorian society.2 Drugs could be medicine, experiment, inspiration, or pleasure, sometimes simultaneously. The Victorians, therefore, did not simply have a culture of denying drugs and their use. They had a culture in which drugs could exist within ordinary, respectable life.
Laudanum serves as a prime example; it was an opium preparation used to treat conditions including dysentery, while other opium preparations were used for coughs, colds, and asthma. Many Victorians obtained medicines directly from chemists without a prescription, and products containing opium were even marketed towards children.3 The boundary between medicine and intoxicant was therefore considerably less rigid and legally bound than it is today.
At the same time, drugs became embedded in Victorian literature and creative imagination. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater transformed opium use into a literary experience, while cocaine and opium appeared in works involving characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Grey.4 As Wellcome Collection notes, Victorian drugs could simultaneously be understood as “inspiration”, “medicine”, and “menace”.5
This is where the psychology of drug culture becomes interesting. A substance does not exist independently from the meaning society gives it. Meaning that when a behaviour becomes associated with status, rebellion, belonging, or excitement, those associations can become part of the reason why people participate in it. Modern research supports the importance of these social norms. One longitudinal study of more than 12,000 young people found that adolescents’ substance use was positively associated with perceived use by their peers, with statistics showing a higher usage with friends/best friends rather than with older siblings or adults.6 Another longitudinal study found that adolescents’ perceptions of substance-use norms were associated with later substance abuse and that young people tended to overestimate the prevalence of substance use among their peers.7
This helps explain the contradiction at the heart of Trainspotting. The film is horrifying, but it is also culturally 'stylish'. Its music, humour, cinematography, fashion, and rebellious characters can make the world of drug use visually compelling. That does not mean the film causes drug use, nor does it mean that everyone who watches it will interpret it positively. Rather, it demonstrates how easily the aesthetic of drug culture can become separated from its consequences. It shows how, if surrounded by this culture, you can easily fall into the same whirlwind of drug use. The toilet scene eventually destroys that separation.
There is nothing glamorous about what Renton is doing; the symbolism is almost painfully direct. The place associated with waste becomes the place in which he searches for something he considers valuable. His dignity has become less important than the drug, and in short, what initially appears as freedom has become compulsion. The distinction matters when looking at drug use among people under twenty today. A teenager may encounter drugs through friends, music, films, social media, or nightlife long before they encounter addiction itself. The cultural image comes first; the consequences may come later.
From the Victorian medicine cabinet to Renton crawling through a toilet, the history of recreational drugs demonstrates that our relationship with substances has never actually been purely chemical. Drugs gain their meanings from the cultures that surround them; they can become tools for medicine, rebellion, status, escape, or even identity.
“People think that it’s all about misery and desperation and death and all that sh*t, which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn't do it. After all, we’re not f**king stupid. At least, we’re not that f****cking stupid.”
— Mark Renton, Trainspotting, 15:15