Above is half of the British artist William Hogarth's engraving titled "Beer Street and Gin Lane", a commentary on the gin craze that overtook England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The first of the series, Beer Lane, depicts a thriving and merry functioning town, while the picture above shows a prostituted mother dropping her baby, a soldier who was hired to pass out anti-gin pamphlets starved to death, a dead baby on a spike, beggars trying to kill each other, tradesmen trying to sell their tools for gin... go check out the wiki page for more details, but it's like a Where's Waldo of drunken insanity and recklessness. It's pretty frightening, actually, especially compared to the idyllic (on the surface, at least) revelry of Beer Street. The craze itself is pretty astonishing, and I had no idea of some of its ramifications until I stumbled actoss this work.
I came across Hogarth after doing some research on Goya's later works, and as a fan of totally effed up lithographs and depictions of old-time insanity, of course I was drawn to it.
I mean, seriously, feast your eyes on this. or this! Niiiice.
I wonder if Hogarth would print a "Joint Avenue and Crack Blvd" were he to look at the most recent drug outbreaks. Better yet, "Rural Route Meth".