Growing up as a kid in the late 1980s and early 1990s was to be bombarded with anti-drug messaging from every angle. Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign was not just in full swing, it permeated the airwaves. School assemblies were called so that D.A.R.E. officers could attempt to ‘scare kids straight’, even if those kids were too young to have experienced drugs in any capacity. Even our beloved Cartoon All-Stars were coming together to mentally scar children with the horrifying certainty that their siblings were not only on drugs but hauntingly so.
The key unifying factor to all these anti-drug campaigns didn’t lie in their simple (if militant) just-say-no mentality, but in their heightened, ludicrous misunderstanding of what drugs were, what they did, and how they came into the lives of the children that were being so heavily indoctrinated. Certainly, these fear campaigns were no Reefer Madness, but not for the lack of demonizing their subject matter.
After *blow*. Get it?
Marvel Comics
No children’s media was free of the message, and at the time comic books were still very much considered a child’s medium. ‘Educational’ comics, printed by comics companies in conjunction with various educational scare groups (anti-drug and otherwise) were ubiquitous. Still, the truly over-the-top happened within our heroes’ monthly stories.
The *FBI* got involved.
Marvel Comics
Sure, you could have heroes helping steer children clear of dope/crack/cocaine/etc, but one tried and true method was to get the heroes themselves addicted, as when Batman was addicted to Venom in 1991. Captain America Epic Collection: Streets of Poison kicks off with a distressing example of this trend.
Druuuuuugs!
Marvel Comics
When Avengers support staffer Fabian Stankiewicz begins to act irrationally, Cap realizes that he’s been driven to paranoia by drug use. This drives Cap to start a vendetta against the people who supplied poor Fabian, Punisher-style. Tracking the drug – a sort of super-meth called ‘ice’ – to a warehouse, Cap finds himself caught in an explosion (set off, of course, by a drug-mad suicide bomber). Bathed in ice, he begins to behave erratically – and violently.
These scare tactic stories often implied that a single encounter with a drug would addict a person from the jump; they also hammered home that drugs made you a different person, and both are true of Cap. He beats up street toughs, he beats up Daredevil. . . he kisses women.
Marvel Comics
Legendarily long-running Captain America writer Mark Gruenwald strays into some troubling territory concerning the nature of the super-soldier serum: wasn’t that just a drug, after all? Does that mean Cap’s been addicted to a drug for fifty years? A medically impossible hail mary is thrown by all-purpose doctor Hank Pym: he gives Cap a complete blood transfusion. This washes away not just the ‘ice’ in his veins, but the serum as well. Cap sets out to prove to himself that the Cap persona isn’t just drugs, but also the man himself.
Marvel Comics
For all its insipid fear-mongering, Streets of Poison is an otherwise sound story, and the issues that follow exemplify how truly great Gruenwald’s work on the book is – the fiftieth-anniversary issue, #383, acts as a celebration for the character generally, but of Gruenwald’s version of him specifically. He endeavors to keep track of otherwise neglected background characters, enriching the somewhat disposable Battlestar, developing the relationships of the Serpent Society, and driving the then-teamless USAgent further into violent insanity. Ron Lim’s tenure as the book’s penciller is a true treat; he creates iconic versions of these characters (even when his faces get a little dodgy), and backups by Mark Bagley furthers to make a book that feels visually emblematic of the era.
The book illustrates how prevalent these sorts of stories were, and can be presented as proof of how distressing they could be; it also proves that not all of those stories were poorly crafted. Streets of Poison certainly outpaces the FBI/Peter David Captain America Goes to War Against Drugs, released that same year (sadly absent from this collection).
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