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Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood

how movies toe the line with prohibition ideology

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 14, 2025



I 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.

*drugwarmovies 2 3 *










Notes for essay entitled Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood: how movies toe the line with prohibition ideology:

1: 'Synthetic Panics' by Philip Jenkins DWP (up)
2: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
3: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)




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Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.

Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.

Billboards reading "Fentanyl kills" encourage the creation of racist legislation that outlaws all godsend uses of opiates. Kids in hospice in India go without morphine because of America's superstitious fear of opiates.

In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."

Drug warriors think only about young people misusing drugs. They never think about the millions of the depressed whom they're condemning to a lifetime of totally unnecessary misery by outlawing drugs.

Freud's real discovery was that drugs like cocaine could make psychiatry UNNECESSARY for the vast majority of people. The medical establishment hated the idea -- so they judged the drug based on its worst possible use!

Scientists hold holistically working drugs to reductionist standards, thereby practicing a sort of pharmacological colonialsm.

Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.

Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?


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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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