Painkillers Are Easy to Get Into but Hard to Escape; The Image of Addiction

05715000 The Image of Addiction Opioid addiction can be nearly impossible to combat, but many organizations are employing their very best efforts in recent Public Service Announcements. Indeed, we see many public service images about drugs of all sorts, and specifically about prescription drug abuse and addiction, but The Orthopaedic Trauma Association’s “Opioid Safety” is particularly effective in communicating the impact of opioid addiction to children, teens, and adults with prescription medication issues themselves, to family members and loved ones of users and addicts, and to physicians who may wish to rethink their approaches to prescribing. To that end, “Opioid Safety” displays a carefully-executed use of color, shape, imagery, composition, and language and influences viewers via power of message, timeliness and context, and clarity of message. First, the power of this ad’s message, opioid abuse and safety awareness, is evidenced through several key elements of the image in “Opioid Safety.” One example is the imagery of a clearly despairing, trapped human in a field of blue inside a pill bottle. In addition, the intensity of the hands compared to the rest of the human’s shadow and the way in which the image of a person completely fills the inside the image of the pill bottle indicates not just being trapped but having no more room inside, being almost squashed inside the bottle. The result is a strong appeal to pathos; the viewer’s heart is drawn in immediately because the human figure appears defeated and hopeless. Viewers will immediately feel compassion, not just for the anonymous figure, but for people who are, in reality, addicted to opioids. It is likely viewers will know at least one person who has dealt with addiction, and this image crosses boundaries in that projects a picture of addiction in general. So, even though the ad is specifically about painkillers, we recognize in that human how all types of addiction feel. A second criterion by which the ad “Opioid Safety” may be evaluated is timeliness/context. The key question relevant to timeliness and context is: How does this particular ad fit with the decades-long campaign to combat opioid abuse? In fact, the image is very recent, and one detail that illustrates the image’s timeliness is the anonymous look of the person in the bottle. In the past, ads have focused on particular segments of society, most notably teens and young adults who i