Cocaine from milk powder: how drugs are substituted in movies
Kyiv • UNN
Production designers talked about creating realistic drugs for movies and TV shows. For filming, they use milk powder, vitamins, and special placebo drugs worth up to $1200.
When it comes to drug scenes in popular TV shows, producers spend thousands of dollars to make them realistic but safe for actors. This is reported by The Guardian, according to UNN.
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“Suitcases of drugs aren't exactly what you'd expect to be on the job,” says Paul Cross, production designer for Supergirl, a superhero crime series that launched last year. However, Cross has had to deal with many of them in his time, albeit fake ones.
He recently drove around London with a van full of fake cocaine briquettes.
It's quite a strange feeling. Not something you would do in your everyday life,
From trendy teen shows to crime dramas, drug scenes often play a key role in modern television series. So ensuring that these moments are safe, legal and realistic has become so important to producers that they can spend thousands of pounds on it. For every pack of fake cocaine unloaded into a fake drug den, someone has to spend weeks creating the perfect powder texture. For every pill taken by an actor, a huge amount of work has gone into making sure it is not harmful.
When it comes to props that actors snort, smoke or swallow, there are industry standards. Cocaine is often recreated using glucose, B12 or vitamin C powder, although the most common substitute is milk or lactose powder. “It mixes with the water in your nose and essentially turns into milk,” explains Philip Barnett, who worked on Sam Levinson's teen drama Euphoria.
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Legal alternatives to weed are often used: plants grown without psychoactive chemicals. “It's like weed that disappoints!” says Cross. Everything else that is smoked is usually nicotine-free herbal cigarettes. Meanwhile, ecstasy and diazepam are sometimes replaced with sweets, but most often with sugar pills bought from pharmacists specializing in placebo drugs created especially for television.
“Placebo companies are extremely expensive,” says Cross. “You can easily spend £1,000 ($1,238) and only get an equivalent amount of the real drug that you would find on the street.
This means that when drugs are needed on a larger scale-for example, to fill a brothel with fake MDMA, crack, cocaine, and weed, as he did on Supergen-the producers have to get creative. They used organic shea butter for the crack, which, according to Cross, “didn't break like it used to, but looked real from a distance.” For the grass, they wrapped the moss with thread, sprayed glue on it, and rolled it in herbs. Meanwhile, 1000 blocks of cocaine were created by wrapping foam blocks used for floristry in shrink wrap. The whole process took about a month.
We had a separate area in the art department, where about six to eight people worked exclusively on the production and packaging of drugs,
Breaking Bad production designer Robb Wilson King took a similar approach to making methamphetamine realistic, consulting both Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officers and dealers he befriended on the streets of Albuquerque, where the series was filmed.
By doing so, we were able to gain access to neighborhoods and houses where methamphetamine was being prepared. We even became friends with some of these people
The chemical smell of the drug is still in his memory. “It was quite scary. You are dealing with a really dangerous thing. If it is done wrong in your presence, you can get hurt. But it's important to feel and see it - you can transfer it to film.”
Actor Jonah Hill spoke frankly about his experience of inhaling vitamin D as fake cocaine in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. “If you get that dose into your lungs, you're going to get really sick,” he admitted.
As for the scenes where actors smoke weed, Barnett says: “The biggest challenge is making it look authentic because most actors don't smoke. Holding a cigarette becomes something they may have to practice.
However, the most important obstacle when depicting drugs on TV is often an authentic representation of the intensity of the drug experience. For Euphoria, for example, the designers used elaborate staging to transport viewers to the high with the characters. “In the first season,” says Barnett, ”when Zendaya, while under the influence of drugs, climbs a staircase and walks down a hallway that becomes unstable, the entire set had to be built on a hinge and then moved to recreate that effect.
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