In this haunting sketch, Benjamin Musheyev imagines a modern-day Dr. Jekyll whose “Mr. Hyde” is summoned not by a personalized potion, but by cocaine. As Musheyev notes in his reflection, several details in the illustration should alert the observant viewer to Dr. Jekyll’s true nature: although he appears to be a handsome man in a lab coat, his pupils are dilated and the corner of a baggie sticks out of the coat pocket. The baggie, positioned between the embroidered “Dr. Jekyll” of his coat and the “H” on his stethoscope, implicitly functions as the mediating force between his two states of being. The images in the background appear to describe the doctor’s tragic “origin story.”

While several contemporary television programs, such as Elementary and House, have explored the addiction issues described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories (the first of which was published just five years after The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Musheyev uses a Victorian precedent to explore a character who — unlike Sherlock — cannot control his addiction well enough to function in society. Perhaps it’s an idea whose time has come.

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