Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 27, 2022
he Drug War kills thousands of black Americans every year by incentivizing drug dealing and the creation of armed gangs, all so that America can outlaw plant medicines that grow at our very feet, some of which "drugs" have inspired entire religions. And yet if you search for the word "drugs" in American scripts for movies and TV, you will find virtually no positive references whatsoever. Every single character is in lockstep with the drug-war party line that tells us that psychoactive substances are pure evil -- unless, of course, they are created by Big Pharma.
Here are just a few such negative references from the over 4,000 hits that are returned when you search Scripts.com for the politically created category that we call "drugs":
"lowlife dope dealers" DIE HARD 2
typical example of how the Drug War Nazifies the English language
"you are a piece of dog turd" REPUBLIC OF DOYLE
Nazified Drug War reference to drug dealer
"If you ever use drugs, I'll kill you." JUNGLE FEVER
Yes, even the director of "Bamboozled" is bamboozled about drugs. He agrees with the Drug Warrior lie that there are psychoactive substances in nature that have no positive uses whatsoever, in any place, any time, any context. This superstitious way of thinking has forced me to go without godsend medicine my entire life. Thanks, Spike. Why do you want people to become drug-hating Christian Scientists, exactly? These things that you call "drugs" have inspired entire religions. Drugs like MDMA can bring the whole world together regardless of ethnicity. Psychedelics can inspire a love for music. HG Wells and Jules Verne swore by coca wine to achieve the mental focus necessary to write their stories.
The conservatives are laughing as they rush to the polls to elect fascists, because they have bamboozled Spike Lee himself to sign off on the Drug War which brings death and incarceration to inner city blacks. Throw away that "just say no" teddy bear with which you were bribed in childhood, Spike, and become truly woke.
(Look for yourself. Go to scripts.com, select "in scripts," and then enter "drugs" in the search form.)
Please remember, screenwriters: "drugs" is just a political term for psychoactive substances of which politicians disapprove. It's a highly hypocritical term, too, since it does not include tobacco and alcohol (which kill half a million Americans a year) nor does it include Big Pharma meds (upon which 1 in 4 American women are addicted for life).
So the next time you write a TV episode or movie, please resist the knee-jerk temptation to echo the Drug War party line that Mother Nature's medicines are evil. By taking cheap shots at Mother Nature's psychoactive medicines, you support an anti-scientific Drug War that has turned inner cities into shooting galleries, caused civil wars overseas, empowered a self-styled "Drug War Hitler" in the Philippines, and disfranchised millions of minorities, removing them from the voting rolls and stealing elections for fascist politicians like Trump, who now want to execute the "drug dealers" that the Drug Warrior was previously happy just to marginalize. Think of the millions of depressed and anxious who must go without godsend medicines today because racist politicians have demonized Mother Nature's psychoactive godsends by dismissing them as "drugs."
Finally, think of the fate of America, for the Drug War is anti-American. To outlaw Mother Nature's bounty is a violation of the Natural Law upon which Jefferson founded our republic. That's why that garden-loving president was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants.
Author's Follow-up: September 29, 2023
I've since learned that the Nixon administration collaborated with Hollywood to add "Drug War" messages to the plots of dozens of hit television series, including Room 222, The FBI, and Hawaii Five-O. (See Drug Warriors and Their Prey). The Clinton administration had the same comfy-cozy arrangement with TV producers. And if Nixon and Clinton were up to that, God only knows how many drug-war messages we've received from the big and small screens thanks to the Christian Science trifecta of Reagan and the two Bushes. No wonder we now have films like "Running with the Devil" in which DEA agents shoot suspects at point-blank range and torture other suspects by hanging them from meathooks in their speedos. It's the final solution, albeit so far on the small scale. That's how they get away with it, in part. It's the final solution on the installment plan, to make sure no one is finally moved to object. That's how DA's got away with the outrageous confiscation of an entire 200-acre estate for finding a marijuana joint somewhere on the premises (who cares where it came from). They kept the confiscations at a level where they could enrich themselves and their police departments while not awakening the ire of the drowsy bamboozled public. The public was primed to accept Gestapo tactics, as it were, on the installment plan.
Drug War Ghouls
The Drug War Ghouls get busy any time a well-known figure dies prematurely, especially when the figure in question is a rock star or actor. You can just hear them whispering childishly: "Aww! Were they on any drugs? Were they on any drugs?" The presumption behind such tittering is that drugs are evil and can only lead to death and destruction. Of course, those who hold this viewpoint always forget that the drug war does everything it can to make such outcomes of drug use a self-fulfilling prophecy by discouraging education about safe use and by ensuring corrupt and uncertain drug supply with their eternal kneejerk prohibition. This is all completely inexcusable. The drug warriors cause death. They are the villains. They are the criminals. Take the so-called opiate crisis. Young people were not dying en masse from opioids when such drugs were legal in the United States. It took prohibition to bring that about.
Hollywood supports the war on drugs by refusing to show wise use while always depicting drug use in the worst possible light. Like all media, they refuse to show beneficial use -- and if they're not depicting drugs as dangerous dead-ends, they're at least showing use to be frivolous and dangerous. The producers kowtow to drug warrior sensibilities.
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice. The media has played its role with movies like "Running with the DEA," "The Crisis" and "The Runner." In the first of these three, the DEA are the "good guys" for murdering a suspect in cold blood. In the second, the DEA plants evidence to cover up the murder of a drug suspect by an indignant mother. And in the third, a white detective stages a raid that kills a young Black teenager that said detective refers to as "a waste of space."
The Drug War is all about making us hate -- making us hate anybody except for the folks that brought about the violence and drug problems in the first place: the damned prohibitionists who, having failed to outlaw liquor, turned their scapegoating on every less dangerous substance in the world.
Meanwhile, the media have done all they can to support this drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.
The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.
Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.
And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.
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.
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Why understandable? Because performers can lose their livelihood should they become too self-conscious. We call that use "recreational" only because we ignore common sense psychology.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.
Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?
Attention People's magazine editorial staff:
Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.
It's rich when Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.
Magazines like Psychology Today continue to publish feel-good articles about depression which completely ignore the fact that we have outlawed all drugs that could end depression in a heartbeat.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda published on June 27, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
he Drug War kills thousands of black Americans every year by incentivizing drug dealing and the creation of armed gangs, all so that America can outlaw plant medicines that grow at our very feet, some of which "drugs" have inspired entire religions. And yet if you search for the word "drugs" in American scripts for movies and TV, you will find virtually no positive references whatsoever. Every single character is in lockstep with the drug-war party line that tells us that psychoactive substances are pure evil -- unless, of course, they are created by Big Pharma.
I've since learned that the Nixon administration collaborated with Hollywood to add "Drug War" messages to the plots of dozens of hit television series, including Room 222, The FBI, and Hawaii Five-O. (See Drug Warriors and Their Prey). The Clinton administration had the same comfy-cozy arrangement with TV producers. And if Nixon and Clinton were up to that, God only knows how many drug-war messages we've received from the big and small screens thanks to the Christian Science trifecta of Reagan and the two Bushes. No wonder we now have films like "Running with the Devil" in which DEA agents shoot suspects at point-blank range and torture other suspects by hanging them from meathooks in their speedos. It's the final solution, albeit so far on the small scale. That's how they get away with it, in part. It's the final solution on the installment plan, to make sure no one is finally moved to object. That's how DA's got away with the outrageous confiscation of an entire 200-acre estate for finding a marijuana joint somewhere on the premises (who cares where it came from). They kept the confiscations at a level where they could enrich themselves and their police departments while not awakening the ire of the drowsy bamboozled public. The public was primed to accept Gestapo tactics, as it were, on the installment plan.
You have been reading an article entitled, Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda published on June 27, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
