Martin Scorsese's film GoodFellas (1990) is an examination of the criminal lifestyle in America. Director Scorsese uses the techniques of film to good advantage in shaping the story to keep every element fresh. He builds an overall impression of the activities of organized crime, and shapes a different film experience in a genre that has been addressed many times with varying results by other filmmakers in the past. Drugs are part of the criminal lifestyle presented in the film both as a commodity to be distributed and sold and as a substance used by the criminals themselves. They may use drugs in order to flout convention, make themselves feel good, or deaden their fears about the world they have created. The film uses the story of one particular criminal to comment on the whole criminal enterprise and in a larger sense to comment on aspects of American society over the past three or four decades, including the spread of drug use and the networks that supply the product.
The film is based on the book by Nicholas Pileggi, Wiseguy, and that book is told in the first person by the man who lived the actual events recounted. The man is Henry Hill, who for forty years was a gangster associated with a New York crime family. Hill started as a young boy who admired the gangsters in his neighborhood in New York in the 1950s and aspired to be one, and eventually joined the ranks. Yet he defected to protect himself from prosecution and testified against his friends in the mob in the 1980s. He now lives under the witness protection program with an assumed identity. Hill told his story to Pileggi, who wrote a detailed account of Hill's years with organized crime. That account revealed much about the workings of organized crime, the members of the gangs, the people who tolerate and even assist them, and both the perceived advantages and limitations of being a member of organized crime. In the end, what unraveled Hill's life in the or...