If we are going to be talking about the portrayal of drugs and crime in the media, there is no way we can forget about 21 Jump Street. Now, on a normal basis I would have chosen the original, but since I think the most recent Jump Street fits better with a contemporary view on drugs, I'll bring in Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum.
In the film, former high school nerd Schmidt (Hill) and jock Jenko (Tatum) help each other through training to become cops. After getting into some trouble, the partners are stationed on 21 Jump Street, which is an office of sorts for young cops who can pass off as high school students while solving crime in schools. They are assigned to find the dealer and supplier of a drug HMFS which recently killed a student. Schmidt and Jenko essentially switch their previous high school roles and work on the case while becoming a little too invested in their high school lives.
After watching the entire first season of The Wire, there are lot of difference that we can compare when it comes to how drugs are portrayed in the media. First of all, in The Wire the dealer and supplier are respected much like Eric Molson is in 21 Jump Street, but there is a level of fear from Barksdale that Eric doesn't have with his friends. There is also different demographics when it comes to the two dealers. Eric is a teenage, upper-class white kid from a suburban area and Barksdale is 20-35 year old, lower-class black man living in urban Baltimore. So we get two very different representations of drug dealers with these two forms of media. Part of that representation, mind you, also comes from the comedic aspect of 21 Jump Street.
The criminal investigation process is also very different between the two media representations. For one, Schmidt and Jenko go undercover to discover who is dealing and supplying the drugs. Then there is the obvious problem of their unprofessional cop manner, which they support as just going with their undercover persona, but we discover that it is a much more personal investment. There is even a scene when Eric questions the partners' undercover identity, considering that they could be cops, but then he says with the behavior the two "brothers" elicit there is no possible way they could be cops. In The Wire, the cops work under a professional manner and aren't undercover by any means so the process is much different.
Now talking about the moral panic around drugs portrayed in the media, we don't get this use sense of moral panic do to the comedic nature of the show. Obviously Ice Cube is pretty adamant about Schmidt and Jenko finding the supplier to stop the spread of the drug. There doesn't seem to me much concern by about the spread of the drug ruining the lives of high school students. However Ice Cube does make a funny statement about how since it was an upper-middle class white kid who died from the drug, now the case was important enough to look into. But even from the students at the school, there isn't this hype or panic surrounding the spread of drugs through the school. Also the representation of moral panic usually is stemmed from the overdone media coverage and we have none of that represented in the film. It also down plays the potential panic since it is a comedy.
Unlike how other drug centered TV shows and films represent drug crime, 21 Jump Street handles the issue in a completely different manner with the comedic element. Rather than having drug problems revolve around poor, heavily black populated urban areas being distributed among adults, the films provides an upper-middle class, high school setting with mostly white teenagers running a drug ring. However, I think it is important to point out the potential message this movie is trying to make about our perception on drug crimes and its representation in the media. That maybe by going against our societal expectations and stereotypes in the film it is making a point about the representations we get in shows such as The Wire. Something to think about.
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