The painting depicts the ritual of man firstly toying with drugs, secondly the addiction to drugs and finally the death by drug abuse.
This is
represented by two large heads on smaller bodies instilled into the background.
These figures being at either end of the "Trail of Tears" the one to the
right is looking quite normal, as he has just taken his first step into the drug scene.
The figure to the left being totally the opposite, abnormal, emaciated, confused and on the border between life and death.
There are scenes depicting the drugs trade, the drug barons and warlords, their countries that grow the commodity and their economies that depend on it for survival. The advent of the hypodermic needle giving easy access to the blood stream has furthered widespread abuse.
In the work, the fortress like seed head has become an entity, alive, strong; and painstakingly determined. Its objective to entice, draw in the non-users and convert them into drug misuse and oblivion. They would be drawn as if by a strong gravitational force with only one option, that of being manipulated, their right of movement channelled down into the depths of the seed capsule. Once there, never to surface until the seed head has nurtured, fed and watered you to addiction.
Once you have been indoctrinated you are ejected back into society to pollute the populace. This would in turn create a cycle whereas eventually the taking of drugs would be the norm. Thus refusing to participate would categorise the non-user into a minority who would be hounded, tracked down and persecuted, eventually to succumb to the awesome power of Poppy seed capsule. Like the shadow of death a lonely cold clammy corner would be provided where the body, trembling, would fester to malignancy and certain death.
How do we in a civilised society combat this plague ?
Firstly with world-wide co-operation the drug's existence should be wiped out at the source, "cut off its head" and the rest of the body will die. The misery that drugs produce within society is incalculable, the cost is enormous. Education and interpretation coupled with decisive preventive measures ought to be at the forefront of governmental priorities. This problem will not go away as long as the world's governmental stance remains the same.
The affluent West, seen to be riding a white horse, cannot expect poorer third world countries to knuckle under. If the trade in drugs ceased today in the producing countries anarchy would prevail. This situation arising from urban economies collapsing, eventually people would go hungry, become homeless. So the vicious circle is evident once again.
Western nations as a coalition would benefit by giving massive monetary aid to the producing localities of third world countries, This would reduce the growth of the drug, hence the savings as a whole on the societies of the western world would be tenfold on the initial outlay. Unless action is taken to resolve this dilemma, the above may become reality.
Drugs are a case in point, the drug effects co-evolve with the user action until the original person is lost, the effects then dominate the original cause. To control such complex systems we must break such feedback loops, reduce the connectivity or cross-coupling between the variables, this having the effect of moving the system from chaos to stability.
Systems with such feedback loops are nonlinear. This causes an inherent unpredictability in their behaviour. A nonlinear system can behave in several different modes, depending upon the values of the system 'constants'. These control parameters are usually assumed not to change, thus fixing the system behaviour in a known mode. Yet if change to 'constants' does take place, for any reason (a part failure or a perturbation perhaps), the system can move instantly to a very different mode of behaviour, maybe from stability to total chaos...