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Glenn Close but no cigar

Four Good Days full of drug war propaganda

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 25, 2020



Shame on Glenn Close for starring in the Drug War propaganda movie "Four Good Days," especially at a time when Donald Trump is threatening to use the death penalty to kill minorities who dare to use and sell the plant medicines of Mother Nature. For shame!

Every horror that Glenn Close's character blames on heroin 1 2 is actually caused by the Drug War itself:


Let's examine some of the movies illogical assumptions one at a time by considering a variety of drug-war-biased sound bites of which the movie is so full:


Deb to daughter Molly: "The deal was, you wouldn't come back until you were clean."

Clean? The mother's use of the word "clean" here exposes the puritan Christian Science metaphysics that the Drug War presupposes. Psychiatry has addicted me personally to Effexor 3 , but no one has told me that I'm dirty for using it, and it has a relapse rate every bit as high as heroin! Apparently, I'm not "dirty" as long as I settle for being hooked on the drugs that enrich pharmaceutical companies.

High school student to Molly: "I would have never allowed myself to fall that far."

Cruel but true. The fact is that the vast majority of kids do not fall as Molly did, even when the Drug War does all it can to confuse them with propaganda instead of straightforward objective accounts of drug effects. Molly's irrelevant response to this challenge is simply to tearfully reiterate how hard she (Molly) has struggled and how continuously she (Molly) has resolved to go straight, but to no avail. Her goal seems to be to imply that there are devil drugs out there that will snag anyone, but smarter kids know that substances are only substances and that the terms "good" and "bad" only apply to how they are used, for what reasons, and in what doses, etc. To think otherwise is to call on government to wage a bloody War on Drugs to protect fools like Molly from herself, a Drug War that ironically creates the very incentives that cause drug sellers to peddle addictive meds in the first place.

Deb after seeing teenage drug dealer: "That guy should be shot."

Great. Thanks for that, Glenn. That's all we need to hear from a cinematic representative of middle America, now that we have a president who is all-too-eager to take your suggestion literally and start murdering Americans, mainly minorities at that - and why? - for merely meeting the needs of the market that the Drug War itself has created. Unless we suppose that the profit motive will someday disappear from human hearts and that human beings will renounce their desire for spiritual transcendence, a "War on Drugs" can only bring about endless killing, first on inner city streets and then on the public scaffolds.

The answer is clear, Glenn: remove the profit motive by ending the drug laws that create it. Then turn the Drug Enforcement Agency into the Drug Education Agency, an organization tasked with objectively informing the public of the statistically verifiable dangers (yes, and benefits) of every psychoactive substance on earth: from Big Pharma 4 5 antidepressants 6 to cocaine 7 8 , from alcohol to cigarettes.

Meanwhile, if someone needs to be shot, how about shooting those who create legislation that 1) violates natural law, 2) keeps godsend medicines from the depressed, 3) turns inner cities into shooting galleries, 4) locks up 10s of thousands of minorities, thus stealing elections for conservatives, 5) justifies Drug War colonialism, 6) prevents Earthlings from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet, and 7) makes drug-hating Christian Science the state religion when it comes to psychological healing. I'd rather not shoot anybody, of course, but if you think we have to, let's get our priorities right first when it comes to targeting.

Mother Deb, in reference to her detoxing daughter: "She's in hell right now."

Too true, Deb, but did you ever stop to ask WHY she's in hell? She's in hell because the drug-war has outlawed all the non-addictive substances (and/or the potentially addictive substances that could be easily used non-addictively) that might otherwise be used during the withdrawal process to ease withdrawal symptoms, and/or give the patient the psychological insight to better tolerate them. For even the detox centers are in the thrall of the Drug War, throwing addicts on cots and forcing them to go cold turkey when there are hundreds of psychoactive godsends that we're not even allowed to study, let alone use, medicines that can change attitudes and give addicts a new start in life.

Deb to Molly: [There's your] boyfriend Eric. Outside that flophouse.

Flophouse? Deb's referring to the bombed-out building in which Molly used to "shoot up," of course, but then what is the detox center but a flophouse, with meals included? The difference is that the rent is much higher, but otherwise they just flop you down on a cot and let you suffer, without ministering to you with any of the thousands of psychoactive balms of the rain forest, many of which, if used with reverence, can temper the mind of the addict to allow them to envision new realities and thus to make the desired changes in their life -- all without going through the hell that the Christian Science Drug Warrior insists that they must suffer.

Detox Doctor Ortiz: "Heroin has a 97% relapse rate."

What Doctor Ortiz fails to point out is that antidepressants like Effexor have identical relapse rates. In fact, psychiatrist-author Julie Holland tells us that many SSRIs are harder to kick than heroin. Why? Because modern antidepressants muck about with one's brain chemistry, which takes a long time (if ever) to resume a normal baseline after the discontinuation of continuously used SSRIs.

Speaking of the good Doctor, it's rather amusing to see him puffed up with professionalism in his white coat and carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, obviously in the prime of his professional life, and yet for all these customary bells and whistles, his job seems to consist merely of injecting Naltrexone and nodding gravely or cheerfully, as circumstances warrant. If appearances weren't everything in such treatments, a cost-sensitive CEO would instantly replace him with an LPN, or better yet an industrial robot decked out in the customary white garb of an officious rehab do-gooder.

Dr. Ortiz has not one single weapon in his pharmacological arsenal, not one (though thousands of rain forest meds are practically crying out to be assayed for such therapeutic purposes), except for Naltrexone, which, however, for him must seem a literal godsend, since it keeps a person from "getting high," which is the absolute no-no in Drug Warrior parlance, even though one person's "getting high" (off of, say, a non-addictive substance such as the psilocybin mushroom) can be another person's "spiritual transcendence." And so the rehab "expert" not only ignores the user's very reason for drug use -- self-transcendence -- but works to ensure that the patient never experiences that self-transcendence again in their life -- for that would constitute a relapse, don't you know. So full speed ahead until the user acknowledges their weakness vis-a-vis the modern boogieman of "drugs" and learns to console themselves for their unfulfilled ambitions in life by prayerfully passing on their sorrows to a thinly disguised Christian God known as "a higher power."

Worst of all, the heroin habitue (sorry, addict) in this movie is constantly lighting up a cigarette containing tobacco -- about the worst drug on the planet -- and the clueless mother sees absolutely no irony in that fact. As long as the drug being consumed supports capitalism , Glenn Close's usually apoplectic character is as quiet as a mouse. It's only when she sees someone attempting to seek transcendence without the use of a board-certified doctor that her character's hackles start to rise. The mother herself freely rushes to the refrigerator for a stiff peg whenever she becomes overwhelmed with her addict daughter's erratic behavior, blissfully ignorant of her own hypocrisy in so doing.

One can only conclude that the mother's problem is not so much with the daughter's addiction as it is with her failure to conform to the usual social norms of the coffee-swilling, cigarette-smoking, alcohol-swigging Drug Warrior.





Remember when the vindictive and hypocritical Glenn Close character murmurs that the teenage dealer "should be shot"? Well, in her defense, the apparent "scumbag" that she was referring to was white. In the 2021 movie "The Runner," another piece of drug-war agitprop, a white detective investigating a drug ring refers to a black teenager -- black TEENAGER, mind -- as, and I quote, "a scumbag, not worth another thought." And this detective was the hero of the film, along with the white teenager Aidan, of course, whom he literally slapped around and forced to "go undercover," after first denying him his right to a lawyer, reminding the badgered youth that "Guilty people want lawyers."

This kind of anti-American and racist dialogue should make movie viewers gag on their popcorn, but you'll have to search long and hard to find a movie critic who finds this plot revolting (and don't hold your breath waiting for Common Sense to flag the fascist tendencies of this film-- their job, after all, is to flag the mere mention of the boogieman called "drugs," not to complain about the fact that America's obsession on that subject has steered the ship of state toward hardcore fascism). It's not like the kids are suspected of dealing in nuclear weapons -- rather they are suspected of selling plant medicine that has been used wisely by other cultures for millennia, the prohibition of which has created drug cartels and inner-city gangs out of whole cloth, while causing civil wars in Mexico and empowering a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines.

And what's this nonsense about dehumanizing a mere teenager as a "waste"? Does Detective Wall not remember his own youth? I'm not the only 64-year-old who sees his teenage self as an entirely different person, given what I've learned the hard way over the last four-plus decades of my life. The last thing we need is for drug-war zealots to judge us once and for all based on one childhood exploit. And yet the racist detective openly announces his desire to lock the black "waste" up for 20 years. He doesn't get his way, incidentally, but that was only because his SWAT team accidentally killed the kid -- assuming it's possible to "accidentally" kill a teenager by riddling his chest with bullets from every possible direction -- as part of a criminally irresponsible raid on a bunch of unarmed teenagers.

Author's Follow-up: August 6, 2022





In his various interviews, Noam Chomsky repeatedly talks about how American politics is designed by the rich elite to turn the mainstream middle class against the less fortunate -- to thereby keep the bourgeois class busy, as it were, with their self-righteous recriminations so that they'll never have the time or the unity to make a sustained case for better education or adequate housing or adequate healthcare etc. What he might have added is that the elites are able to divide and conquer America like this largely because of the Drug War. For let's face it, it's an age in which you can no longer get away with demeaning another race, another ethnic group, or another religion. And where does all that pent-up prejudice go? Not to worry, because our Drug War gives us the answer: thanks to the War on Drugs, Americans are given carte blanche to out-Nazi the Nazis when it comes to demonizing "drug users" and "drug dealers," those fellow Americans whom we are permitted -- and even encouraged -- to call scumbags and filth, words once reserved for the Jews and homosexuals in the Third Reich. And why are we given this freedom of slander and libel? Because these fellow Americans are guilty of a crime that did not even exist 150 years ago: the crime of using and selling medicines of which demagogue politicians disapprove -- medicines that they falsely claim have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, at any time.

That's why Glenn Close seems like an American role model these days when she looks at a teenage dealer in "Four Good Days" and mutters, "He should be shot!"

Of course, if we're gonna shoot anyone, we should shoot those who created the Drug War to tear America apart by demonizing amoral substances.

Barring this, then we may as well give Glenn's character a swastika epaulet and a German accent, under the theory that we simply cannot be mean ENOUGH toward the Christian Science heretics that we call "drug dealers."

Author's Follow-up: August 20, 2022



Thinking more about Glenn Close's desire to shoot the teenage drug dealer. It never occurs to her that the answer is teaching and education, not demonization. When the poor are taught the true facts about all substances without hypocrisy (as opposed to being taught to fear them, which is the written policy of the Office of Nation Drug Control Policy as conceived by Joe Biden 9 10) and when Mother Nature is free again, like it always was until 1914 America, then the whole social landscape would change as we begin to think logically about substances rather than ideology. The point here is that the current system is set up to scapegoat the young and vulnerable for any drug-related issues -- and it succeeds like a charm, as Glenn Close is the American Everywoman when it comes to the middle class who takes out her anger, not on the powers that be who incarcerate millions of minorities and now call for their execution (the powers that be who withhold godsend morphine 11 from dying kids and have lied about godsend medicines for the depressed for almost 100 years now) but rather on the poor, the uneducated, and the young.

The demagogue Drug Warriors are laughing all the way to the bank. But I suppose we Americans should be happy. At least we're not overseas where presidents like Reagan have done all they could to murder those who were seeking social justice. capitalism 12 uber alles, don't you know?

Divide and conquer. For the slogan of the moneyed Drug Warrior is: "Keep their eyes OFF the prize."


What Have We Learned?

September 20, 2024


I learned that...
(mouse over responses to check your answer)

1) Drugs are pure evil and must be battled at every juncture.


2) Drugs are neither good nor bad.









Notes for essay entitled Glenn Close but no cigar: Four Good Days full of drug war propaganda:

1: Heroin versus Antidepressants DWP (up)
2: 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)
3: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
4: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
5: 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)
6: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
7: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
8: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
9: Joe Biden (up)
10: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think Bienenstock, David, Leafly, 2019 (up)
11: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
12: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.

"All these anti-opium articles... are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William Brereton

The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.

No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.

Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.

"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

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.

Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity. We need to educate people about drugs rather than endlessly arresting them for attempting to improve their mental power!

Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief. --Dr. Noam Shpancer, Psychology Today


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