Crafting the Modern via Psychoactivity Advertisements

Abstract

In this article, we examine advertisements for psychoactive products sold in five different geo-political jurisdictions: Canada, Colombia, Yugoslavia, India, and Senegal. We compare products and marketing campaigns aimed at selling psychoactive substances to consumers in these places over the twentieth century. Ultimately, we argue that the sale of these products was inextricably bound up with ideas of modernity, nation-building, and a homogenizing of global attitudes towards the benefits of psychoactivity. We examine the aesthetic and textual qualities of advertisements to first show how these ads produced ideas about belonging that invoked ideas of nationalism. Advertisers also marketed the access to their products as a reciprocal way of demonstrating belonging—touting access to Coca-Cola, for example, to prove consumers lived in a modern place. Being modern and performing modernity, advertisers suggested, also required the consumption of psychoactive products to cope with the associated strains of being or becoming modern—an idea that applied to individual consumers as well as nations. In this way, the history of psychoactive products and modernity are deeply interconnected, and in this article we critically analyze this relationship to reveal how advertisers characterized modern behavior and national progress as intricately linked to consuming psychoactive products.