thought I'd watch "Smile 2" last night since I had found "Smile 1" reasonably enjoyable. This was a mistake, however, because the opening scene was pure Drug War agitprop. It was clearly written to advance the notion that drugs are the problem, not prohibition.
The movie begins with the efforts of a livid vigilante to punish a drug dealer whose recent gunplay had inadvertently killed a woman and her young child. Sure, that's evil -- no one likes a wanton killer. But how much more evil were the politicians and other demagogues who created a world in which such people do such things?!
We did not have Americans torturing each other and firing guns carelessly in public before the War on Drugs incentivized such extreme violence. And yet movies like "Smile 2" keep reinforcing the idea that drugs and drug dealers are the problem, not prohibition, that we have only to crack down hard enough -- with vigilantes, if needed -- and the problem will go away, nay, that it is our duty to crack down and to erase drug dealers from the face of the earth.
Just think about what the Drug War has done here. Think about the movies that you've seen which feature extreme torture and extreme disregard for human life. Chances are that the vast majority of their plots concerned drug dealing.
Does anyone see what's going on here? Substance prohibition has created the violence on which these movies are all-too-accurately based. And this is inexcusable because common sense psychology tells us that prohibition would do precisely this. People like to get rich and there will always be a morally challenged minority which will go to extreme measures when extreme incentives are offered thanks to insane social policies like prohibition.
This is another reason why the FDA is enormously biased when it comes to drug approval. Not only do they ignore the obvious positive effects of the drugs that they bash, but they also ignore the obvious negative effects of outlawing drugs. The FDA is supposedly all about keeping us safe, right? And yet by outlawing drugs, they are enabling torture and wholesale murder!
And yet no one sees this -- nor will they ever see this thanks to movies like "Smile 2"!
Schopenhauer says that the truth will eventually be known, but I am beginning to wonder.
I never thought of myself as a great genius, but the idiocy of the vast majority on these topics is beginning to swell my head. Either I am a genius, being the only one to recognize these obvious syllogistic truths, or there are a fair percentage of people out there who "get this" but are just not speaking up -- or else they are hiding their knowledge in academic-speak. Academic Philip Jenkins wrote about the Drug War in "Synthetic Panics1" in reasonably lucid prose, but his work has had limited effect for two reasons: 1) He refrained from drawing any overt conclusions from the data that he had amassed, and 2) He gave his book a title that did not even mention "drugs." In other words, he shielded himself from mainstream criticism, but only at the cost of diminishing the impact of his book.
Even factual and assumption-free movies about drug-related deaths are propaganda in the age of the Drug War. They may not be propaganda "in and of themselves," but collectively they are part of an obvious propaganda campaign -- a campaign of censorship designed to make us associate drugs with nothing but death, dying and dead-end streets.
Drug War Movies
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.
Schopenhauer synthesizes the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Plato with the philosophy of eastern religions, according to which we human beings are unable to perceive Reality writ large. This limitation, however, which both Schopenhauer and Kant suggest applies to all human beings as such, may actually only apply to "sober" individuals, as William James was to point out a decade after Schopenhauer's death. James realized that the strategic use of drugs that provide self-transcendence can help one see past the so-called Veil of Maya. He went so far as to insist that philosophers must use such substances in an effort to understand ultimate realities -- advice that, alas, most modern philosophers seem committed to ignoring.
"No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
The exciting thing now is to consider Schopenhauer's philosophy in light of the revelations provided by certain drug use and to assess how such epiphanies tend to confirm, qualify or perhaps even refute the German pessimist's ideas about an eternal and unchangeable will, a will which the philosopher tells us is manifested in (or rather manifested AS) objects, animals, plants and persons. Schopenhauer tells us that the will corresponding to these entities is purposeful, for it seeks to create a specific kind of object or individual, but that the will is also meaningless, in the sense that the fact that it IS a specific kind of will is an arbitrary given, to which we need not ascribe any purpose, let alone a creator.
I am still trying to wrap my head around that latter claim, by the way, the idea that there can be teleology without design. I think I am slowly beginning to understand what Schopenhauer means by that claim in light of Kantian distinctions, but I am by no means sure that I agree with him. Yet I am not qualified to push back at this time. Further reading is required on my part before I can either refute him advisedly, or else concede his point. I do find, however, that Schopenhauer occasionally makes definitive-sounding claims that are actually quite open to obvious refutations.
In "The World as Will and Idea," for instance, he states that tropical birds have brilliant feathers "so that each male may find his female." Really? Then why are penguins not decked out with technicolor plumage? To assign "final causes" like this to nature is to turn animals into the inkblots of a biological Rorschach test. Not only is Schopenhauer being subjective here, but he has an agenda in making this particular kind of claim: he wants to underscore his belief that there is a logical causative explanation behind the fact that "wills" of the tropical birds would manifest in this colorful way, that it was not some act of extravagance on the part of a whimsical creator. But this kind of explanation is not the least bit compelling since one can imagine dozens of equally plausible "final causes" for the feature in question: the birds want to attract mates, the birds want to warn off predators, the birds want to mimic other yellow birds, the birds want to collectively camouflage themselves while roosting as one big yellow object (or more accurately, the birds' wills want to do these things).
One senses that Schopenhauer would respond as follows: "Fine. Give any reason you like, Ballard. But whatever you do, do not tell me that some suppositious God likes variety!"
And what about this famous pessimism? It's so typical of curmudgeons to try to make a universal law out of their own psychological issues. Schopenhauer does not seem to understand that attitude matters. As Hamlet said, "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." It is neither the shortness of life nor the inhumanity of our fellows that ruins life for most people -- but rather their attitude TOWARD such circumstances. Every manic-depressive knows that a blue sky and party cake does not make a person happy, nor living amid postcard scenery. One can commit suicide in Disneyland just as well as Skid Row. It is attitude, attitude, attitude that matters -- from which it follows that it is a sin to outlaw substances that can help us adopt a positive attitude toward life. That's why it's so frustrating that philosophers like Schopenhauer pretend that life can be judged by circumstances alone. Only once we acknowledge that attitude matters can we clearly see the importance of the many mind-improving medicines of which Mother Nature is full, the meds that we slander today by classing them under the pejorative label of "drugs."
We need to stop using the fact that people like opiates as an excuse to launch a crackdown on inner cities. We need to re-legalize popular meds, teach safe use, and come up with common sense ways to combat addictions by using drugs to fight drugs.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."
Ketamine is like any other drug. It has good uses for certain people in certain situations. Nowadays, people insist that a drug be okay in every situation for everybody (especially American teens) before they will say that it's okay. That's crazy and anti-scientific.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
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."
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
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.
Here is a typical user report about a drug that the DEA tells us has no positive uses whatsoever:
"There is a profoundness of meaning inherent in anything that moves." (reported in "Pikhal" by Alexander Shulgin)
We should be encouraging certain drug use by the elderly. Many Indigenous drugs have been shown to grow new neurons and increase neural connectivity -- to refuse to use them makes us complicit in the dementia of our loved ones!
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, Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood: how movies toe the line with prohibition ideology, published on January 14, 2025 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)
thought I'd watch "Smile 2" last night since I had found "Smile 1" reasonably enjoyable. This was a mistake, however, because the opening scene was pure Drug War agitprop. It was clearly written to advance the notion that drugs are the problem, not prohibition. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood: how movies toe the line with prohibition ideology, published on January 14, 2025 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)
