America's Obsession with Fascist Drug War Movies
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 7, 2021
Interesting. Most movie producers seem to be stuck in the '80s, determined to toe the party line that psychoactive medicine from Mother Nature is devil spawn, which is a lie scientifically, historically and cross-culturally speaking. In "Running with the Devil" from 2019, CIA agent Leslie Bibb tortures one "drug suspect" and murders another in cold blood, shooting him at point blank range while she's puffing the hell out of her ever-present cigarettes. If a Drug War makes sense, then she should be the first one to be shot, since her drug of choice (nicotine) kills far more than the stuff she's cracking down on. The message of these movies 1 2 is insidious: it says basically that America should declare martial law and simply kill everyone who dares to sell Mother Nature's psychoactive plants. Funny, I missed that part in the US Constitution, the part that calls on us to exact barbaric justice on folks who dare to use plant medicine of which politicians disapprove.
Then there's the 2022 film 'The Runner' in which the WASP hero (Detective Wall) calls a black teenager a "waste" and a "scumbag" because he's selling plant medicine that has been used responsibly by other cultures for millennia. And (spoiler alert) Wall gets a medal for killing the black kid later in a poorly conceived SWAT raid. But not to worry, the raid also killed the obligatory adult Hispanic drug dealer, so Wall can take credit for doing more than killing children.
The Links Police
Pull over to the side of the web page: topic-related links coming through viz. the media and the way they misunderstand the Drug War:
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Notes:
1: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
2: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
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Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
How would we even KNOW that outlawed drugs have no positive uses? We first have to incorporate them in a sane, empathic and creative way to find that out, and the drug war makes such a sensible approach absolutely impossible.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.
Our government treats drugs like uranium and spends hundreds of billions of dollars trying to scare us about them.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
It is a violation of religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate. The Hindu religion was inspired by just such a drug.
Materialist puritans do not want to create any drug that elates. So they go on a fool's errand to find reductionist cures for "depression itself," as if the vast array of human sadness could (or should) be treated with a one-size-fits-all readjustment of brain chemicals.
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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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