Review of Running with the Devil, starring Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne and Natalie Reyes
"Running with the Devil" is the latest Hollywood film to glamorize the perverse logic of America's Drug War, to celebrate the trampling of the U.S. Constitution and to glorify inquisitorial torture, all in the name of keeping Americans -- and the world -- safe from Mother Nature's plants.
Notice how the hypocritical DEA agent "hero" happily TORTURES her witness, and then has the nerve to tell a man who's selling NATURALLY-OCCURRING SUBSTANCES that he's "dirt."
Is this what American values have come to? Why is Leslie Bibb' character on a high horse when the Drug War is quashing research on valuable drugs for depression -- and single-handedly creating the violence that the DEA sets out to fight?
Hey, here's an idea: re-legalize MOTHER NATURE and then fight BAD BEHAVIOR, NOT PLANTS.
Don't Laurence Fishburne and Nicolas Cage have better things to do in Hollywood than produce propaganda for the DEA - an agency which steals elections for conservatives every year by locking up a million liberals for possessing naturally occurring substances and then taking those liberals off the voting rolls by turning them into felons?
U.S. elections aren't being swayed by the Russians, they're being stolen by American movie producers, including companies like Jaguar Bite and so-called Patriotic Pictures, who have done everything they can with this movie to bequeath DEA tyranny to their great grandchildren, by celebrating the perverse torture-friendly values of today's Drug Warriors.
The minister in the film laments that the fascist DEA agent's kin were lost to "this drug epidemic."
What drug epidemic? There is no more of a drug epidemic in America now than there was a drinking epidemic during prohibition. The drug impurities and violence that we wring our hands over are not a result of a drug epidemic -- they are a result of the Drug War itself, which drives the price of drugs through the roof, makes it impossible to ensure the purity of purchased substances. And by criminalizing non-addictive psychoactive plants, the DEA makes it inevitable that those seeking medicines for their conscious state will end up on hard stuff.
Besides, the DEA has no right to talk about a drug epidemic since they completely ignore the great addiction of our time: the fact that 1 in 8 Americans are addicted FOR LIFE to Big Pharma antidepressants.
The Drug Warrior doesn't give a good gd about addiction -- they just want the user to be paying their drug money to big pharma -- using their addictive meds rather than using non-addictive psychedelics that could improve one's life in just a few uses.
{^Hello? This is the DEA. How may I ruin your life and destroy your human potential by deliberately withholding plant medicines that are well-known to provide insight and a fresh way of thinking about the world?}{
And at the end of the film -- SPOILER ALERT -- the fascist DEA agent shoots the bad guy. This is what the war on patients -- the war on mother nature -- has done: it has turned Americans into supporters of torture and extra judicial killing. Why? Because we refuse to get the message that the Drug War itself is creating the violence that we're fighting.
It's time for the fascist DEA to step down -- to stop criminalizing Mother Nature's godsend medications -- to start showing a little compassion for the millions that have gone without godsend medicines for the last 50 years thanks to DEA lies about psychoactive substances.
The first step is for Hollywood to stop releasing Drug War propaganda like "Running with the Devil."
Oh, by the way: Agent Natalie was smoking a cigarette just before she "offed" the bad guy. Talk about hypocrisy.
One of the most deadly drugs in history -- she's sitting there smoking it! And yet she's in such a self-righteous state that she's ready to kill an unarmed suspect???
Please. We should make cigarette possession a felony and let Agent Natalie see what others go through when their go-to natural substance is criminalized.
In fact, if we must have a Drug War, then let's start by throwing callous Drug War hypocrites like William Bennett in the pokey indefinitely. Chimney pots like Billy kill countless people every year by second-hand smoke. Oh, and let's not neglect to take away his voting rights and forbid him from running for public office.
If he so much as desires a job at Dollar General, I want William Bennett to submit to a urine and saliva test for the presence of the slightest bit of tobacco in his system before he earns a cent.
Mind you, I'd prefer to end the anti-patient Drug War scam entirely, but if we're going to have one, let's start by running roughshod over the rights of the myriad hypocritical smokers and drinkers among the Drug War zealots.
But back to the disgraceful DEA propaganda film aka Running with the Devil.
This is a particularly disappointing movie, by the way, because it seems to show how little we've learned. There's been a psychedelic renaissance of sorts in the last 20 years, as science has actually been given at least a teensy bit of leeway to study psychedelics and show how incredibly useful they can be for depression and other mental conditions. Yet here we have a Hollywood movie doing its best to reinforce the Drug War superstition that a plant becomes evil incarnate just because we had the chutzpah to criminalize it. It's about time we faced facts, and stop letting politicians decide for their own selfish reasons what we should feel about nature's plants.
CHECK OUT THE horrible anti-American message of this movie. It is as follows:
The Drug War is still not working, so we need to crack down even harder?!
Still harder? We've already signed off on torture and murder and we're locking up so many leftists that conservatives now are stealing our elections. What is the end game here: total dictatorship?
And why? So that we can stop Americans from using natural plants to change their minds safely.
I hate to say it, but there's a kind of terrible poetic justice every time an ex-DEA agent starts moldering away in a retirement home, wishing they were dead. Too bad for them, because they have spent their lives keeping mind-easing medicines away from the American public -- so I don't want to hear one groan from them as they go miserably to their fate. They have worked all their lives to prevent minds from healing -- by outlawing Mother Nature. Now they must live with the consequences of their blind patient-hating ethics.
Fortunately my better angels will never let me actually be as evil toward DEA agents as they have been toward the American public, especially minorities. But what can I say? If those DEA agents persecute drugs that can grow new neurons, what right do they have to complain when they or their loved ones start needlessly suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia? They've lied about the substances for five decades and prohibited research and now they're going to lament the lack of progress in fighting brain diseases?
Well, if they want to stop and ask themselves why more hasn't been done in this area, I've got news for them: all they have to do is look in the mirror.
Author's Follow-up: August 30, 2022
What a fine, upstanding movie. Gotta love the part where the DEA agent gets on her high horse and spits on the local agent. He should have spit right back: "Hey, the stuff I'm sellin' is far less lethal than the alcohol and tobacco of which you so freely avail yourself."
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence" 2019 Yale University Press
Aurelius, Marcus "Meditations" 2021 East India Publishing Company
Mate, Gabriel "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" 2009 Vintage Canada
Maupassant, Guy de "Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques - Guy de Maupassant: Les classiques du fantastique " 2019
McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
Reynolds, David S. "Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville " 1988 Oxford University Press
Richards, William "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Hardcover" 2015 Columbia University Press
Rosenfeld, Harvey "Diary of a Dirty Little War: The Spanish-American War of 1898 " 2000 Praeger
Straussman, Rick "DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences " 2001 Park Street Press
Streatfield, Dominic "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" 2003 Picador USA
Swartzwelder, Scott "Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy" 1998 W.W. Norton
Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
Zinn, Howard "A People's History of the United States: 1492 - present" 2009
Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
