This artwork is meant to represent harm reduction which in most cases I’m referring to is the passing out of clean needles and other equipment to help drug users stay safe from bloodborne disease. It saves lives and keeps people free of disease but is is controversial because it involves enabling drug use. I decided to depict this issue as a monkey smoking a cigarette because its related to the bigger issue of large for-profit drug companies enabling drug use and putting us in the position to use drugs in the first place, and then society looking down at addicts like they are the lowest level of human who aren’t even deserving of clean equipment as if drugs aren’t as available as candy. Monkey represents the helplessness, how they look down at us as stupid, how we are the product of our environment. The cigarette represents the drugs, what we can have and what we can’t, the small amount of relief. The thorns over the eyes represent the innocence of the afflicted but it also represents the harm caused by addiction. I drew multiple different parts on paper and cut them out and connected them as one moving piece hopefully the video posts correctly.