The author continues his mission of writing movie reviews on the IMDB for all films that exploit the Drug War without pointing out that it is just plain wrong. This review was posted for the 2012 film entitled Drug War, aka Du zhan.
Drug War movies 123 are just modern Gladiator Shows for American Drug Warriors. Producers of such films exploit the violence created by the absurd Drug War for personal gain. Americans, used to urinating for employment, fail to realize that the Drug War is simply the enforcement of Christian Science Sharia -- Christian Science: the religion that says we have a moral obligation to renounce the medicines of Mother Nature. The Drug War is corrupt. No other society has ever scapegoated substances like this to turn ordinary people into criminals. Producers should stop exploiting it. And movie reviewers should stop treating these movies as if the Drug War that prompted the action was somehow moral and common sense. Thomas Jefferson didn't think so -- and he was rolling in his grave when the DEA confiscated his poppy plants, the same DEA that has been lying about psychoactive plant medicine for the last 50 years. Enough Drug War propaganda movies , already.
August 23, 2022
Charming as this broadside no doubt was, it failed to get down to brass tacks viz. specific movie titles, no doubt because the hypersensitive author was so pissed by the tyrannical principle at play here that he pettishly recoiled from even contemplating such irritating specifics, let alone enumerating them, in the same way that the hypochondriacal Roderick Usher recoiled from hearing anything but the "peculiar sounds" of certain stringed instruments. So to demonstrate that Brian knew whereof he spoke (whereof he positively raved), we adduce the following recent feature titles which promote the drug-war ideology of substance demonization: Crisis, Running with the Devil, The Runner, and Four Good Days. These titles are the most obvious offenders that come to mind, but let's face it: almost any modern movie that mentions "drugs" (as that term is hypocritically defined by Drug Warriors) tends to promote drug-war ideology, if only by associating substance use with scoundrels and/or by otherwise enforcing the standard drug-war narrative that the use of demonized substances can only result in heartbreak and sorrow.
SPOILER ALERT: Warning! Pretty much any movie that involves arguments over a huge amount of cash is going to end up being a Drug War propaganda film at some point, if only by tacitly associating violence and hedonism with "drugs" (never mind the fact that the association is a product of the drug-war itself). I'm a bit of a horror buff myself, but I'm turned off when flicks gratuitously bring "drugs" into play, as in otherwise promising flicks like "Don't Say Its Name" and "When Darkness Falls." Take the latter Scottish-based title, for instance: The suspenseful and scenic caper had snagged my undivided attention for at least 80 of its 105-minute run time, but when that bag full of money was discovered in the abandoned house toward which the two hapless female hikers had been journeying, I said to myself, "Oh, here we go. All the evil of the movie will be tacitly ascribed to 'drugs.'" In fact, I actually turned the movie off at that point. But then, reflecting that I may have been rash, I continued to watch, after which I was relieved to find that the term "drugs" was never even mentioned in the film (although there was a post-it note in the money bag which made it clear that the booty therein came from a dirty evil rotten (and bad) drug deal. As for "Don't Say Its Name," it supposedly had to do with a Native American curse, but I flicked it off in less than 25 minutes when one of the apparent stars started ranting about the opioid crisis, in such a way, of course, as to imply that it was caused by dirty evil "drugs" rather than by a dirty evil Drug War -- a war that outlawed all safer means of self-transcendence which had been legal since caveman days.
For more on "drugs" in the movies 4 , one could do worse than click on the following:
The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
We drastically limit drug choices, we refuse to teach safe use, and then we discover there's a gene to explain why some people have trouble with drugs. Science loves to find simple solutions to complex problems.
The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!
In a compassionate world, we would give laughing gas kits to the suicidal just as we now give epi pens to those with severe allergies.
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.
Even when laudanum was legal in the UK, pharmacists were serving as moral adjudicators, deciding for whom they should fill such prescriptions. That's not a pharmacist's role. We need an ABC-like set-up in which the cashier does not pry into my motives for buying a substance.
Imagine educational documentaries showing how folks manage to safely incorporate today's hated substances into their life and lifestyle.
"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.
We would never have even heard of Freud except for cocaine. How many geniuses is America stifling even as we speak thanks to the war on mind improving medicines?
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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