Expedition Towards Drug Trade Empathy

So I attended the Royal Geographical Society's Explore conference last month and as was the aim of the conference I was inspired to start thinking about my own conference.

And I came up with the simple idea of tracing the supply chain of an illicit substances and making a photo essay of the journey or perhaps a series of vignettes/interviews with the people involved with the trade.

However, the more I looked at this project I was bowled over by the scale. The impetus for everything was a photo essay of the supply chain of drugs, as I could see in my minds eye, photos of a poppy field, loaded trucks travelling through Tajikistan, container ships in the North Sea, freight unloading, etc. From that point of view this is less a research project or even a propaganda project, it's more of an art project. Which is not out of my realm of comfort, my first degree was in Art & Design and I have been an active photographer now for three or four years.

However, my second degree was a PhD in History, I am not adverse to research and building a compelling argument. My wife has spent a career counselling people with significant social problems including mostly addition issues. Also I have seen the damage addiction does to a community. I live outside of Dundee, the drug death capital of Europe. I have also seen how the community reacts/supports this challenge and I would have to say that I don't rate our government, local or national in the way they approach drugs, addiction, trauma, mental health, poverty or a number of other problems and that really applies to all of the major parties, not singling any one of them out.

So with that background and the inspiration of the Explore conference I kicked off my thinking about how to make an expedition of this project idea. And perhaps my mid life crisis is about creating impact and not just creating some content that will be thrown into the void. But that increases the scope of this project significantly to focus on the lives of the people involved in the supply chain of an illicit substance. And I don't know how that would impact the any of the taking of drugs or the support of addiction in the UK.

My thinking was to generate empathy through understanding of a system. But what empathy is needed? The supply chain of a particular drug could focus attention on the geopolitical aspect of the substance it could also be a beautiful art project that generates empathy for places forgotten or not even known. Am I looking to create empathy with places? People? Or is that the wrong end of the entire spectrum if my passion is in addiction support in the UK?

If its just stories then there are thousands of aspects of the drug trade that could be focused on, but there is an enormous amount of literature/photos/video/cometary already focused on many of those aspects. I'd guess my thinking would be that with all of that content we still have basic misunderstandings of the drug trade. I believe that there has been glorification of some aspects of the trade from South American drug lords to North American inner city street gangs, but I also think particularly in America that with the rise in the opioid crisis and the previous escalation in the use of methamphetamines there is not a focus on race being drug dealers or addicts. Perhaps for certain flavours of substances, powder cocaine was always considered an upper class drug and therefore white and crack cocaine was associated with black communities. But in all of this race coding and sources of drugs the fact still remains regardless of the substance is that people are taking drugs. No matter how many wars on drugs, or captured shipments or bringing down cartels or wars in Afghanistan that go on, drugs are available, fashions may change, but people continue to take them.

All of that said, I also don't want to produce anything that comes across as drug tourism, or voyeurism. I don't think that would be useful other than having a jolly to a foreign country. What I do want to create is something that has a measurable positive impact on drug addiction in the UK. What causes impact? What causes positive impact? I can make a lot of noise for a political cause locally and internationally with a bomb vest and a well timed explosion, but that isn't lasting and it's never positive. I remember a phrase from the Iraq war that America got into after 9/11 they wanted to bomb/revenge and they said their campaign was 'Shock and Awe'. What is the equivalent of 'Peaceful Shock and Awe'? The biggest I can think of that got the world to maybe stand up and collectively get together peacefully was the moon landings.

So lots of questions and not a lot of direction. I'll need to keep thinking about it, essentially scale, scope and generated outcomes are still needing worked out.