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)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Self-medication is not a dirty word. It has always been a fundamental right to take care of one's own health -- until the medical establishment demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could believe it.
MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.
Someday those books about weird state laws will be full of factoids like: "In Alabama, you could be jailed for 20 years for conspiring to eat a mushroom."
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
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