How Variety and its film critics support drug war fascism
Letter to Variety
When are Variety and its movie critics going to stop celebrating Drug War fascism? Dennis Harvey should be PANNING films like "Running with the Devil" that makes a case for torture and murder in prosecuting the Drug War, not writing as if the abhorrent movie premise were somehow unremarkable. Not only does Leslie Bibb' DEA character torture a suspect -- and threaten to cut him open -- but she shoots the unarmed "cook" at the end -- WHILE SHE'S SMOKING A CIGARETTE CONTAINING TOBACCO -- a drug far worse than the coca leaves that the agent is determined to suppress. Yet, from the director's point of view, the movie goer is clearly meant to sympathize with the DEA agent? That's the sort of cinematic message that Stalin and Mussolini could have gotten behind (or Leni Riefenstahl for that matter), but Thomas Jefferson would have been appalled.
The last thing that a democratic country needs is a movie that glorifies violating the constitution in the name of the Drug War. Nor does the DEA deserve to be glorified like this.
AUDIO5
It is a lying and self-serving institution that has blocked valuable drug research ever since its founding in 1973 (still saying to this day that there's no therapeutic value in psychedelics, a flat out lie ignoring both recent cutting-edge clinical trials and thousands of years of breathtaking evidence, including the Eleusinian mysteries and MesoAmerican ritual), forcing folks like myself onto addictive Big Pharma antidepressants by default, when just a few sessions with outlawed and inexpensive psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca could have given me a new outlook on life and insight into my human condition. As for the violence that Natalie battles in the movie, wake up: It's all caused by the outlawing of plants in the first place! We outlawed Mother Nature and surprise, surprise: we created a huge black market. What did we expect?
Besides depriving folks of godsend medical therapies, the DEA is stealing elections in America by arresting a million Americans every year for drug possession and removing them from the voting rolls, Americans who would have otherwise thrown the Drug Warriors out of office. Russia is not stealing American elections, it's the production companies behind anti-democratic movies like this that are stealing elections - and they're being aided and abetted, sad to say, by publications like Variety that refuse to speak out against the increasingly anti-American message of Drug War movies like this one, movies that attempt to morally justify torture and extrajudicial murder -- all in the name of criminalizing the therapeutic plants that grow at our very feet.
PICTURE0019
{^DEA Job Opening: Hit Man apprentice
Must be willing to not simply flout the US Constitution, but to heap scorn upon it along with its so-called legal protections for American citizens. (Hah!) Ideal candidate will have documented experience as a schoolyard bully.}{
PS I'm writing you in this venue because your comment form does not show up when I click on "leave a comment" under Dennis Harvey's review - also because this is not just a comment about that one review but about all drug-war movie reviews published by Variety, in the hope that you will start denouncing movies whose message, like this one ("Running with the Devil"), is so thoroughly anti-American and pro-fascist
NOTE: Some will say that this is only a movie, to which we respond that Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will' was a movie, too, but it was also a symptom of a sick fascist society. Besides, if "Running" is a libel on the DEA as it actually exists, we have yet to hear the DEA indignantly denounce it as such. To the contrary, they love these sorts of movies, because the popularity of their fascist messages suggests that the DEA has many long years ahead of it of treating Mother Nature like a pariah and American citizens like dirt -- at least those who dare to recognize the psychological benefits of Mother Nature's much slandered pharmacy. And so we continue treating plants as pariahs when the villains of the piece are the profit motive combined with superstitious Drug War lies according to which banned substances are evil incarnate, and not amoral substances that, like anything else, can be used for both good and evil.
Author's follow-up note: November 14, 2019
Surprise, surprise. Variety magazine didn't get back to me. Apparently they're quite satisfied with their policy of bigging-up fascist flicks. [sighs]
You have been reading essays by the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass, at abolishthedea.com. Brian is the founder of The Drug War Gift Shop, where artists can feature and sell their protest artwork online. He has also written for Sociodelic and is the author of The Drug War Comic Book, which contains 150 political cartoons illustrating some of the seemingly endless problems with the war on drugs -- many of which only Brian seems to have noticed, by the way, judging by the recycled pieties that pass for analysis these days when it comes to "drugs." That's not surprising, considering the fact that the category of "drugs" is a political category, not a medical or scientific one.
A "drug," as the world defines the term today, is "a substance that has no good uses for anyone, ever, at any time, under any circumstances" -- and, of course, there are no substances of that kind: even cyanide and the deadly botox toxin have positive uses: a war on drugs is therefore unscientific at heart, to the point that it truly qualifies as a superstition, one in which we turn inanimate substances into boogie-men and scapegoats for all our social problems.
The Drug War is, in fact, the philosophical problem par excellence of our time, premised as it is on a raft of faulty assumptions (notwithstanding the fact that most philosophers today pretend as if the drug war does not exist). It is a war against the poor, against minorities, against religion, against science, against the elderly, against the depressed, against those in pain, against children in hospice care, and against philosophy itself. It outlaws substances that have inspired entire religions, Nazifies the English language and militarizes police forces nationwide.
It bans the substances that inspired William James' ideas about human consciousness and the nature of ultimate reality. In short, it causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, meanwhile violating the Natural Law upon which Thomas Jefferson founded America. (Surely, Jefferson was rolling over in his grave when Ronald Reagan's DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants.)
If you believe in freedom and democracy, in America and around the world, please stay tuned for more philosophically oriented broadsides against the outrageous war on godsend medicines, AKA the war on drugs.
PS The drug war has not failed: to the contrary, it has succeeded, insofar as its ultimate goal was to militarize police forces around the world and help authorities to ruthlessly eliminate those who stand in the way of global capitalism. For more, see Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Oh, and did I mention that most Drug Warriors these days would never get elected were it not for the Drug War itself, which threw hundreds of thousands of their political opposition in jail? Trump was right for the wrong reasons: elections are being stolen in America, but the number-one example of that fact is his own narrow victory in 2016, which could never have happened without the existence of laws that were specifically written to keep Blacks and minorities from voting. The Drug War, in short, is a cancer on the body politic.
Rather than apologetically decriminalizing selected plants, we should be demanding the immediate restoration of Natural Law, according to which "The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being." (John Locke)
Selected Bibliography
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McKenna, Terence "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution " 1992 Bantam
Miller, Richard Louis "Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca Kindle " 2017 Park Street Press
Pinchbeck, Daniel "When Plants Dream" 2019 Watkins Publishing
Poe, Edgar Allan "The Essential Poe" 2020 Warbler Classics
Pollan, Michael "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence " 2018 Penguin Books
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Szasz, Thomas "Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers" 1974 Anchor Press/Doubleday
Whitaker, Robert "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America " 2010 Crown
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Zuboff , Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2019 Public Affairs
Site and its contents copyright 2023, by Brian B. Quass, the drug war philosopher at abolishthedea.com. For more information, contact Brian at quass@quass.com.
