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We are calling on everyone across the country to have dinner with the people they care about and to break the silence on drugs and addiction by discussing it.
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— Dr. Oz
OVERVIEW
In America, more people die from drug and alcohol addiction than in car accidents. 1 in 10 people over the age of 12 abuse drugs or alcohol, while only 11% of those needing addiction treatment actually receive it. Over 50% of inmates in federal prisons are imprisoned for drug offenses. Drug and alcohol addiction are some of the most taboo and difficult topics to discuss with loved ones. To create awareness and encourage compassionate conversations in the most natural setting for difficult discussions — the dinner table — we worked closely with teams of advisors and experts to create the online platform Drugs Over Dinner. Our assignment was to use design to get people talking about taboo subjects with compassion.
APPROACH
To reach the broadest audience the Drugs Over Dinner platform needed to be free of religious or spiritual affiliation. As the topic of addiction is known to be political and polarizing, the resources provided on the platform needed to be neutral and bipartisan. Overall, the website needed to be universal and welcoming.
Following the success of Death Over Dinner we wanted to apply the same model to the taboo topic of drug and alcohol addiction. We teamed up with co–founders Michael Hebb and Jamison Monroe Jr. of Newport Academy along with leading addiction experts worldwide including Dr. Gabor Mate, along with Huffington Post as a media partner, to create Drugs Over Dinner.
Once again we built a 5–step guide to hold a compassionate conversation around the taboo topics of drugs and alcohol addiction. Hosts and attendees are provided with a series of unbiased text, audio and video resources as a jumping off point for the conversation. Resources are further tailored by age ranges to ensure adults can have this much needed conversation with children and young adults.
Until now, society’s approach to addiction has been to paint the issue in black and white. In creating the identity for Drugs Over Dinner, we took inspiration from this cultural oversight and styled the identity in stark black and white. It evokes the intersection and overlapping of the two Ds — Dinner & Drugs. The resulting op art and psychedelic moiré give the illusion of a continuous letter. The maze–like quality also references current drug culture and our political and societal inability to navigate the issue.
