I would argue that if one watches Breaking Bad to its conclusion that it's hard to say that it glorified the manufacture and sale of meth. Everyone involved has huge negative consequences in their lives as a result. The collateral damage is staggering. By the end, Walt seems as addicted to the sense of power that making meth gives him as the user of meth desperately seeking their next hit. He sabotages himself and ultimately gets himself shot (probably killed -- though I think this is open to interpretation) chasing his last hit.

It does the antihero bit pretty well. It shows life going on after Walt's brother in-law is killed. In real life people would be a lot more torn apart by it, and not just sad.

The main thing it glorifies I think is that boys will be boys, not drugs per se. Those who criticize them just don't understand that boys have to find their own way, and it ain't always pretty.

I think "high school chem teacher builds a drug empire that rivals Mexican cartels" is definitely a glorified macho-suburban fantasy elevated to an art form. In reality season 1 would have ended with Bryan Cranston's character dissolving in a vat of drain cleaner or buried out in the New Mexican desert missing his head and fingers. I mean, look at the drug addict that gets the most screen time in the show: he's the cofounder of the drug empire guiding the main character through the drug game like a methed out Master Miyagi.

Compare it with Snowfall: the main character's family has at least some history of drug dealing and he only succeeds because he discovers a cheap and ultra-addictive recipe for crack cocaine and because the CI-freaking-A is using him to fund the global war on communism. Recurring characters get killed off in dumb gang skirmishes all the time and the drug addict with the most screen time is literally a shell of her former self that can barely get through the day up until the latest season.

Or compare it with The Wire: all the people involved in the drug game are only in it because they have literally nothing else to live for except the glory of the game. Basically no one survives except the cops and Bubbles never really gets fully clean.

> There's plenty of alcohol, weed, cocaine, and hallucinogens, I'll give you that, but they're not gateways to opioid addiction.

This is only partially accurate. There are two primary "pipelines" to opioid addiction; one of them is overreliance on painkillers, but the other one is fairly standard risk-seeking escalation through a socially deleterious lifestyle, often culminating in an OD or a prison sentence after a predictable years-long risk escalation path through social drug use.

I will agree that I don't think there's a lot of media showing meth or fentanyl use as cool and attractive, but my overall point is less that a specific drug needs to be shown to be cool, and more that the artistic construction of the drug lifestyle as alternative, exciting, rebellious etc. wears down the emotional barriers of a lot of people when they're young and malleable. I've done a good number of drugs in my day and I can assure you that in the case of most of the people I did drugs with, early exposure to "drugs are cool" art and music played a part in their ready acceptance of the lifestyle.

As one example, if you go to a high school party, often the riskiest, coolest kids will go off in private and do drugs. There's no feedback loop in the media to make this look pathetic or sketchy--on the contrary, most drug use is played for laughs, or it's added as another dimension to a lifestyle that's supposed to be tragic but instead looks awesome. "Oh my god, look at this guy's life, he's a mess, his apartment is so dirty, he's doing lines off the mirror... with a smoking hot supermodel-actress while we do a B-plot story about how his small-town parents are boring and stodgy... and he's a rock star..."

I don't really know whether or not you could seriously reduce drug use by not showing it in the media, but I do believe that showing it as positively as it is now increases drug use. And I haven't even mentioned the music surrounding drugs.

> Oxy, fentanyl, and p2p meth aren't exactly the drugs musicians and Hollywood turn to as a lyrical/plot device.

Oxy is hugely glamorized in rap music. Drinking "lean" / cough syrup and doing Percocet pills. Future song "Molly Percocet". The Weeknd's record label is called XO for Ecstasy / Oxy.