Marcel Winatschek

This Is Your Brain

Meaghan Liist designs the kind of work that doesn’t waste your attention—clean, purposeful, nothing extra. She made a series a few years back called This Is Your Brain On Drugs that I’ve thought about since, mostly because reductive work this good is harder to pull off than it appears.

Each drug gets one image. MDMA is a heart. Cocaine is a roller coaster with a line through it, the high and the consequence as a single shape. Speed is zigzags—pure acceleration rendered as pattern. They’re not explained or judged, just there: the image and what it means.

The heroin one is different. It’s less a poster and more like looking at something you shouldn’t, all collapse and void. I think that’s intentional.

You can buy them as prints now. There’s something honest about selling drug imagery as art to an audience that knows the subject—no winking, no apology, no safety guardrails. Just the image and whatever you bring to it.