by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 7, 2019
Message sent to Common Sense Media in response to their review of the 2019 drug-war movie Running with the Devil, starring Leslie Bibb, Laurence Fishburne and Nicolas Cage
Your review of Running with the Devil1 misses the point. The movie sends a HORRIBLE message to kids, not because of four-letter words but because the government agent in the film willfully tortures a suspect and then shoots and kills another suspect in cold blood. A government agent does this! The film is thus educating children to embrace fascism!!! Why? To stop the bad guy from dealing in plants that should never have been criminalized in the first place. In other words, the Drug War creates all the violence that the DEA is fighting in the movie!
And the hypocritical DEA agent is smoking a cigarette when she cold-bloodedly kills an unarmed man!!! Tobacco is one of the worst drugs on the planet in terms of addiction and health costs2. And yet this hypocritical DEA agent is smoking the stuff while she self-righteously kills a man who's marketing plants -- a plant that is used to this day for spiritual purposes in South America3. Please, tell your reviewers to wake up and start considering the true message of these movies. Stop focusing just on curse words and think what these movies are saying about American democracy.
This movie is saying: "to hell with democracy: we need fascism to fight the War on Drugs!" In other words, the war on plants, the war on minorities, the war on patients - as the DEA "heroes" are the ones who lie about psychoactive plants in their scheduling system and thus leave millions of Americans - including my 92-year-old mother - without much needed medicine that could ease their minds and even help them make their peace with death4.
If you really want to help kids, help them to steer clear of movies like this that glorify fascist police tactics and the Draconian enforcement of immoral laws.
{^The Common Sense website reviews movies for crude language and violence, but it fails to warn parents when a movie promotes murder and torture in the name of the Drug War. Reviews on Variety are just the same. They may warn viewers about the scene in which the DEA agent tortures a suspect, but only because the torture victim was wearing only Speedos, not because his torture represents a flagrant violation of American law and a repudiation of everything that the US supposedly stands for.}{
LINKSMOVIES
May 11, 2022
Common Sense should not even be flagging movies for "drugs," since drugs is a political term: namely, "psychoactive medicine of which politicians disapprove." Do we flag movies in which a character takes a drug for a physical condition? No? Then why are we flagging movies in which characters take a drug for a mental condition (such as anxiety or foggy thinking)? When Common Sense flags such drug use, they are simply warning readers that the movie runs afoul of the religion of Christian Science as it pertains to medicines: for it is not a scientific fact that mind medicine is bad -- but rather an article of faith among westerners that such substances are bad, just as Mary Baker Eddy basically said that ALL drugs were bad, since perfection of spirit and body was to be achieved, or so she believed, not through medicine but by praying to Jesus Christ5.
If they insist on flagging "drug" use, they should flag drug use without hypocritical exceptions: they should flag "drug" use when a movie character takes anti-depressants6 (on which 1 in 4 women are chemically dependent) and alcohol (which causes 95,000 death a year in the US alone), and tobacco (which kills 450,000 in the states yearly), and coffee, and Monster Energy Drinks, etc. Instead, Common Sense is aiding and abetting the brain-dead Drug War ideology which tells us we should fear certain demonized substances rather than understand them, and that it is therefore wrong to even talk about the safe use of those substances of which politicians disapprove.
If they were honest, Common Sense would replace the flag titled "MOVIE CONTAINS DRUG USE" with a flag titled "MOVIE RUNS AFOUL OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE ORTHODOXY.7"
Author's Follow-up: April 11, 2023
There should be a "flag" for the countless movies that promote the anti-scientific ideology of substance demonization. "Warning: this movie promotes the false idea that some substances are bad in and of themselves, without regard for how they are used." Or, "Warning: this movie promotes prohibition policies that have killed millions in the last 50 years and militarized police forces around the globe." Or, "Warning: this movie promotes an ideology that has forced the depressed and anxious to go without godsend medicines for the last 50+ years.8"
UNCOMMON SENSE MOVIE WARNINGS
"RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL" -- WARNING: CONTAINS DRUG WAR AGITPROP: SUSPECTS ARE HUNG FROM MEAT HOOKS AND TORTURED, ALL IN THE NAME OF PROSCUTING A WAR ON TIME-HONORED MEDICINE.
"TRADER" -- WARNING: CONTAINS DRUG WAR AGITPROP: SCRIPT TOES THE DRUG WAR PARTY LINE THAT OUTLAWED SUBSTANCES ARE IMMORAL WITHOUT REGARD TO FACTS OR LOGIC.
"THE RUNNER" -- WARNING: CONTAINS RACIST DRUG WAR FANATICISM: DETECTIVE IN FILM CALLS A BLACK TEENAGER A 'WASTE OF SPACE' AND BLACKMAILS ANOTHER TEEANGER TO NARC ON HIM. SPOILER ALERT: UNARMED BLACK TEENAGER KILLED IN RIDICULOUSLY IRRESPONSIBLE RAID ON HIGH-SCHOOL DANCE, FOR WHICH THE DETECTIVE ACTUALLY EARNS A MEDAL!
Notes:1
Running with the Devil,
(up)2 Edney, Anna,
8 Million Tobacco Deaths Could Be Avoided by Slashing Nicotine, 2017
(up)3 JJ, Tschudi,
The Imperial Incas of Peru (from 'Travels in Peru'),
(up)4 Quass, Brian,
Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology, 2022
(up)5 Quass, Brian,
Why the Drug War is Christian Science Sharia, 2020
(up)6 Quass, Brian,
Why SSRIs are Crap, 2023
(up)7 Quass, Brian,
The Drug War = Christian Science, 2019
(up)8 Quass, Brian,
Depressed? Here's why you can't get the medicines that you need, 2022
(up)
More Essays Here
Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs
Scientists are not the experts on psychoactive medicines. The experts are painters and artists and spiritualists -- and anyone else who simply wants to be all they can be in life. Scientists understand nothing of such goals and aspirations.
Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"
Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
Someday, the First Lady or Man will tell kids to "just say no to prohibition." Kids who refuse will be required to watch hours' worth of films depicting gun violence, banned religions, civil wars, and adults committing suicide for want of medicine that grows at their very feet.
More Tweets
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, Common Nonsense from Common Sense Media: So-called media watchdog scorns dirty words only, not dirty wars, published on November 7, 2019 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)
