This Is Your (Digitized Composite) Face on Drugs

Remember DARE and "Just Say No" and those "This is your brain on drugs" commercials with the egg in the frying pan? Of course you do, but such scare tactics probably had little to do with your decision of whether or not to drink or smoke weed or experiment with a little chemical alteration.

Hence, Recovery.org's latest anti-drug campaign takes a different tact. One that figures that catching the attention of young people means playing on their vanity.

The group published a series of "Drug Mugs" that depict the average face of a substance abuser. It's meant to highlight the unflattering physical effects of the drugs.

They collected 600 of mugshots of white people between age 18 and 35 who were arrested for drug and alcohol-related offenses and merged them together with the composite imaging software PsychoMorph. The results are about what you'd expect. The pot smokers look pretty chill, the DUI offenders look kinda drunk and frazzled, and the meth addicts look terrifying.

The website describes the faces more specifically:

• DUI female: older, intoxicated
• DUI male: dazed, angry, smug
• Meth female: sagging skin, gaunt, gray complexion, sunken eyes, sleep-deprived
• Meth male: gaunt, thin, unhappy, sleep-deprived
• Marijuana female and male: round or full face, relaxed, large pupils

All three accelerated aging, causing more wrinkles and a loss of skin elasticity.

Somewhat interestingly, despite the unflattering physical effects of the various drugs, the faces are relatively attractive. That's par for the course with composite images. The more photos you merge together, the imperfections and variations in people's faces cancel each other out, resulting in a symmetrical average.

Past research has shown that the more average-looking a face is, the more people find it attractive. Researchers from the University of Glasgow illustrated this theory by mashing together faces of women in various countries around the world to create the average face, and discovered that it was beautiful, across the board. Especially compared to the drug-users' mugs.

Composite images are an interesting variation on the timeworn before and after shots used to promote beauty products or scare people off certain behavior. The Drug Mug campaign reminded me of a recent project done by researchers at  researchers at the Case Western Reserve University and published in the Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

The researchers found identical twins, one of whom was a smoker and the other wasn't, and compared photos of the two siblings. The smokers' faces were noticeably less attractive and unhealthy looking. They had bags under the eyes, sagging skin, sore smile lines, wrinkles around the lips and eyes. They should stick those photos on cigarette packs.