Over-identifying with Sherlock

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I know that I am over identifying with Sherlock, but I’m kind of disappointed with the direction the show is going with Sherlock’s drug use.

It just seems like every bad after school special trope is getting thrown in.

I’m not trying to say that drugs don’t cause problems. My drug use had a serious negative impact on my life, mostly in the way it prevented me from getting actual help for some crippling mental health issues (both because I was self medicating and because covering up my drug use meant that there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t talk to a therapist about without outing myself). Also, I almost died. And my boyfriend did die.

And, yes, I spent a bunch of time in squats. Because I thought I was cool and counterculture and a rebel, or whatever I thought when I was 20. But, in my experience, it’s actually pretty difficult for someone from a stable and affluent family and who is getting a STEM degree to fall so far off track that they are forced to get high in a dirty squat. My boyfriend, who had actually been getting high in a squat (with actual electricity, because come on, like squatters don’t know how to find buildings where the electricity hasn’t been turned off), legally could not live with his mother because she was destitute and seriously unhinged and living in elder housing. And he wasn’t getting a degree in Chemistry.

And, yes, I spent a bunch of time rolling around on the floor high. But usually with someone cute.

For me Sherlock Holmes was the archetypal portrayal of the functional drug user. Which doesn’t mean that he’s not a big mess in a lot of ways. He has an unhealthy relationship with everything: eating, sleeping, sex, work, relationships, smoking, his body, boundaries, personal space, expressing his feelings, romanticizing evil geniuses, you name it.

But by minimizing the cases and his brilliance at his work, and having Mycroft repeatedly jumping in to save him, and then making his drug use so chaotic and destructive, they’ve taken a more subtle story about the personal costs of “functional” drug use, and made it blunt and reductive.