<p>There’s next to no information about this snippet from an unknown longer film, which was discovered and circulated by the excellent film-arcana tumblr I•HATE•THIS•FILM. Its luridly coloured diagrams of microscopic areas of the brain interacting with f illegal substances virtually belong in the “visual music” subgenre of abstract animation. The soundtrack is as electronic as the imagery is literally electric: we seem to both hear and see the fizzing of chemical transmitters triggering receptors in the brain and making synapses fire in unnaturally intense or prolonged ways. Also circulated by I•HATE•THIS•FILM. , a companion snippet titled “A History of Drugs” offers similarly tripped-out imagery and sounds, but is also highly informative. A narrator’s voice, whose neutral technocratic tones resemble HAL from 2001, A Space Odyssey, reveals that opium was used to calm crying babies in Ancient Egypt and created so many junkies during the American Civil War that addiction was called “the soldier’s illness.” Legal highs like alcohol and nicotine are not given a free pass, though, and we learn that Americans back then smoked an astonishing 500 billion cigarettes a year. The downsides of drug dependency and abuse are brought home vividly with geometric animations illustrating the convulsions that afflict hardcore speed-freaks and the delusions that can befuddle some users of psychedelics. </p> <ul> <li>Simon Reynolds</li> </ul>