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Drug War Agitprop

a list of Movies that promote the pernicious ideology of substance demonization

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 9, 2023



For decades, screenwriters have gotten away scot-free with writing movies that promote pernicious Drug War propaganda, like the idea that it's okay to kill and disfigure folks who dare to sell medicines of which racist politicians disapprove, and that it's just fine to treat folks like dirt if and when they use such medicines -- even though, when it comes to Big Pharma 1 2 drugs, we say that they have a duty to "take their meds."

Below is an ever-growing list of movies that promote this hateful ideology that is antithetical to democracy and to a peaceful life of co-existence with our neighbors. I have to create this page because groups like Common Sense refuse to flag movies for drug-war propaganda. To the contrary, they flag movies for containing even talk about drugs, as if viewers need to be warned that a movie would not pass muster with Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.

Groups that flag drug use in movies should also flag the use of aspirin -- since the word "drugs," when used rationally, entails all medications3. The fact that Common Sense does not flag "aspirin" shows that they're not really worried about drugs per se, but rather about psychoactive substances that can improve and expand mind and mentation. They're scared, in short, of precisely the kinds of medicines that tribal peoples have always used for spiritual and psychological reasons -- the same tribal peoples that we drug-hating westerns have decimated and cheated out of their land.

Not content to destroy them physically, we now use Drug War ideology to discredit and vilify their nature-friendly philosophy of life, which held the heretical view that the mind is a kingdom that can and should be expanded with the help of psychoactive medicine4.

movies


that promote Drug War ideology



Four Good Days


Glenn Close plays a hypocritical and vengeful lush who seeks to get her heroin 5-using daughter to seek treatment -- in other words, to pay $3000 for a cot and a shot of Naltrexone. It, of course, never occurs to Glenn's character, Dev, to let her daughter use legally with regulated supply and to re-legalize the hundreds of alternatives that would help her get off of heroin if desired onto a less problematic substance -- all without the gnashing of teeth called for by puritan ideology.

I say Glenn is a "lush" because: no sooner does her daughter pluck her last nerve than Glenn is off to the refrigerator to throw back a liberal helping of house wine. I say Glenn is "vengeful" because she shouts "That guy should be shot!" when she sees a teenage "drug dealer" -- the same teenager whom prohibition has massively incentivized to sell drugs. One wonders if Glenn shouldn't be thrown on a cot and forced to go liquor free, after listening to the relevant moralistic lectures from her own daughter.


Do you know of a movie that promotes the hateful ideology of the Drug War. (I know, I know: you're spoiled for choice, right?) Please let me know and I'll add them to this list of shame. Email: quasss@quass.com subject: Drug War movies 6 7 8 9 .












Notes:

1: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
2: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
3: Common Nonsense from Common Sense Media DWP (up)
4: Just Say Yes to Mother Nature's Pharmacy DWP (up)
5: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
6: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
7: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
8: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
9: Drug War Quotes in TV and Movies DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.

"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud

The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.

Any self-respecting mycologist should denounce the criminalization of mushrooms.

"Those gentlemen who adopt the anti-opium doctrine... are only comparable to the monomaniac, who, sane upon every subject but one, is thoroughly daft upon that." --William Brereton

Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.

Prohibition turned habituation into addiction by creating a wide variety of problems for users, including potential arrest, tainted or absent drug supply, and extreme stigmatization.

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.

"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says the materialist, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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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.

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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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