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Moonfall

a drug-war movie review

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 29, 2022




cartoon police officer standing behind police car with flashing red lights

All right, pull over to the side of the Web page.

Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, you were getting ready to bounce. According to Google Analytics, we have a big problem with 'bouncing' on this URL, so I am pulling over everybody who seems to be in a hurry, reminding them that this essay makes some crucial points about drug prohibition, however unpromising it may seem to you on first glance. Take for instance the caption for the movie poster for "Moonfall" shown below. That provocative caption alone should keep university students arguing for an entire class period -- and then debating with their fellows AFTER class at some local hamburger joint or other.

What's that, your lawyer says you have a right to bounce from any web page you please? Suit yourself. But can you at LEAST read that caption I mentioned and see if it is not productive of lively discussion! I mean, presumably you came here to learn why drug prohibition is absolutely nuts, and that is something that the caption in question decisively proves with the help of the philosophical strategy of reductio ad absurdum.

Okay, off you go, then. There's a line forming behind you and these people are not going to hassle THEMSELVES!

Incidentally, if you're a sci-fi fan, you should also be interested in the two-minute sci-fi play that the Drug War Philosopher wrote back in 2019. He called it Fahrenheit 452, aka Pity the Time Traveler.


The Essay Proper
man straightening bowtie for his tuxedo

I watched Moonfall last night. Or rather I watched most of it. I cut the film off in disgust when the know-it-all clone of astronaut Brian Harper's six-year-old kid Sonny started a pedantic and self-congratulatory discourse about how his own society had transcended war. Yeah, it seems that the alien's 'peeps' were living together in perfect harmony, thank you very much, unlike certain other societies that the little ET could mention. (Hint: the hate-filled creatures in question live on a planet that starts with the letter E!)


Poster for the Movie Moonfall starring Halle Berry and Donald Sutherland. Poster shows asteroids walking on dark side of moon. Text reads: 'In 2022, humanity will face the dark side of the moon.'
Earth... We have a problem. These creatures are freely using psychoactive substances to improve their minds and inspire religiosity. Should we kidnap them and bring them back to Earth for trial? Over.




'Not bloody likely,' I said to myself, as I indignantly closed the PC window upon which I was watching the film on Vudu. If the humanoids of which the tweenager speaks are anything like we Homo sapiens from planet Earth, they would destroy themselves 20 times over rather than condescend to use psychoactive medicine to bring about world harmony, and let's face it, that's the only way such a utopia is ever going to come about for any species even remotely resembling the spite-filled and self-interested Homo sapiens of Planet Earth and their penchant for blind nationalism and the eternal demonization of 'the other.'

Now, if the self-satisfied clone had told me how his alien world had abolished the Drug War and learned how to use substances wisely to promote world peace, then I would have gladly watched the film to the end. I could easily believe that a society could transcend violence in that way. We have proof that it works. Look at the Ecstasy-fueled British rave scene of the 1990s, where there was multiethnic peace on the dance floor, an El Dorado of lovey-dovey diversity completely unprecedented in human history. But don't take my word for it, read what the DJs of the time said about the rave scene in the documentary United Nation by Terry Stone1:

"Everyone's loving each other, man, they're not hating." - DJ Mampi Swift."

"It was black and white, Asian, Chinese, all up in one building," -- MC GQ.

"It was the first time that black-and-white people had integrated on a level... and everybody was one." -- DJ Ray Keith.

But of course westerners never consider unprecedented peace, love and understanding as a benefit of drug use. And so the UK Parliament cracked down on the use of Ecstasy2 in response to one single raver death, which was itself the fault of the Drug War for suppressing the research and education that would have resulted in safe-use guidelines for the drug. Turns out ravers have to remain hydrated while using the substance! Who knew? (Answer: no one, thanks to the Drug Warriors, who ask us to fear and demonize psychoactive medicines rather than to understand them.)

I repeat: in response to one single death, and this in a world where aspirin kills 3,000 a year in the UK alone3 and alcohol... why, alcohol kills 178,000 a year in the United States alone4.

So Earth to the alien know-it-all: Don't tell me that a species resembling drug-hating humans has transcended war -- unless maybe you've got the population so doped up on dependence-causing Big Pharma meds that no one has the gumption to fight anymore. 5 6

Oh sure, humanoids will tell you that they want peace, but if they're anything like us purebred human beings, peace comes in a distance second to their real priority, a priority before which every other goal must give way (including everything from curing Alzheimer's 7 to saving humanity from extinction): namely, the goal of demonizing godsend psychoactive medicines in a racist and unscientific war on the politically created boogieman called 'drugs.'



May 28, 2022

'Moonfall' was not one of those Drug War movies 8 9 10 in which Drug Warriors give medicine users the Nazi treatment. Nevertheless, like so many movies today (and books, and TV shows 11 ) its plot reads problematically when considered in the light of America's unscientific war on mind medicine. In this case, it begs the question, how did a human-like species learn to live with itself without the aid of empathogenic psychoactive medicine, given the fact that we 'purebred' human beings are busy shooting up schoolyards and preparing for armageddon 12 thanks to our criminalization of the same? The only plausible answer is that the humanoids 'did drugs' (as the demonizing Drug Warrior would put it). But if that's the case, then that self-righteous six-year-old clone should have said so, rather than observing the usual politically correct silence on the topic of mood medicine.

Incidentally, look at that favorite Drug Warrior phrase: did drugs. Anyone who uses that trope without irony has been brainwashed by drug-war propaganda. For did drugs is to 'used mind medicine' as did the nasty is to made love. The purpose of the phrase is to disparage the activity that it describes. It is a political way to talk, as well. When John F. Kennedy and his wife used doctor-prescribed methamphetamine, we feel like they used mind medicine. When a bum on the street uses the same stuff, we say they did drugs. Of course, did drugs is a mild disparagement compared with "snorted cocaine," a phrase that likens the fan of the time-honored coca plant to a pig!

Author's Follow-up: August 28, 2022



It's worth reminding the reader here that there are no such things as 'drugs,' as that word is defined by the Drug Warrior. To them, the word 'drugs' means, 'substances that have no valid use: not here, not there, not anywhere; not now, not ever.'

In fact, there are no such substances on planet earth. No substance is bad in and of itself. Even the highly toxic Botox can be used safely if we put our minds to it.

But so-called scientific America starts with the premise that certain substances are evil incarnate and makes it illegal to actually study them, thereby blocking possible cures for Alzheimer's and autism, not to mention society's one and only realistic hope for world peace: namely, the widespread use of entheogenic substances that literally teach the user how to feel compassion for their fellow human beings.


Author's Follow-up: December 3, 2023



Nor is it just entheogenic drugs that can help save the planet. Viewed psychologically, it is a mere commonplace to say, and say correctly, that drugs can give folks the ability to 'stay the course' and to thereby achieve self-actualization in life, notwithstanding their innate or nature-learned proclivity toward procrastination and unproductive loafing. Those who achieve self-actualization in life typically have no desire (or time for that matter) to shoot up grade schools or plot hideous revenge on a lover. In fact, that's basically the definition of self-actualization: that one has time only for making their life work, not for lashing out at others because they feel like a failure. This is psychological common sense, or at least it would be, if the field of modern psychology was not under the sway of Drug War ideology, which insists that no happy ending can ever be ascribed to the use of the modern scapegoat called 'drugs.'

Of course, the Drug Warrior will make sure that we see lots of movies (and news reports) about such drug use going awry -- but then they are literally spending billions of dollars a year to make sure that such attempts end in as abject a failure as possible.









Notes:

1: United Nation: Three Decades of Drum & Bass Stone, Terry, 2020 (up)
2: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
3: Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn Huffington Post (up)
4: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: 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)
7: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
8: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
9: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
10: Drug War Quotes in TV and Movies DWP (up)
11: The Dead Man DWP (up)
12: 8 Nuclear Close Calls that Nearly Spelled Disaster Davidson, Lucy, History Hit, 2022 (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




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."

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987.

This is the "Oprah fallacy," which has led to so much suffering. She told women they were fools if they accepted a drink from a man. That's crazy. If we are terrified by such a statistically improbable event, we should be absolutely horrified by horses and skateboards.

People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.

Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.

We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.

"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.

We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.

Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.

I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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In my spare time, when I am not shaming drug warriors for their heartless drug policies, I create full-cast recordings of classic plays using the latest in synthetic voices licensed by the Natural Reader company. Snag your copy of my production of Volpone, by Ben Jonson... and follow me on Payhip for more where that came from, including classics like The Post Office, The Double Dealer and The Inspector General. -- Yours in all-too-justified outrage, the Drug War Philosopher @ abolishthedea.com.

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