Movie Warnings from Uncommon Sense
find out if your favorite movies contain drug-war propaganda
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 16, 2023
Here are some warning flags for moviegoers that Common Sense will never show you. They're perfectly happy for viewers to be indoctrinated by Drug War lies and propaganda -- their only concern is that the propagandists do not use a dirty word that might corrupt junior! Now, if the movie convinces them to condone torture and murder in the name of the Drug War, that's just fine. Those are all-American values these days, after all, in the age of Christian Science Sharia, aka the War on Drugs.
"RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL" -- WARNING: CONTAINS DRUG WAR AGITPROP:
Suspects are hung from meathooks and tortured, all in the name of prosecuting a war on time-honored plant medicine.
"TRADER" -- WARNING: CONTAINS DRUG WAR AGITPROP: Script toes the Drug War party line that outlawed substances are immoral, even though the substances thus demonized have endless positive uses and are infinitely less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. (They actually badmouth LSD and even Ecstasy! Sounds like the writers received one too many teddy bears as kids for saying no to godsend medicines. It's interesting, though, the trader unabashedly swallows speed -- diverted from fake prescriptions for ADHD kids -- to improve her mind for trading. AND THAT MAKES PERFECT SENSE! But when I saw that, I said to myself: the other shoe is about to fall: they'll have to let us know that this is evil of her: and sure enough, her mysterious male friend on the other side of the phone says (only half jokingly) that he's surprised this trader woman is so immoral as to use such substances. "There," I said to myself. "I knew it. They could not just let her use drugs to improve her game: they had to point out to the kiddies that such use is WRONG!" Propaganda and BS. The only question is, was the plot written by the White House as in Clinton's time.
"THE RUNNER" -- WARNING: CONTAINS RACIST DRUG WAR FANATICISM: Detective Wall calls a black teenager a 'waste of space' and blackmails a white teenager to narc on his schoolmate. Spoiler alert: The unarmed black teenager gets killed in a ridiculously irresponsible raid on a high-school dance, for which the detective nevertheless earns a medal!
"FOUR GOOD DAYS" -- WARNING: PROMOTES SUBSTANCE DEMONIZATION: Glenn Close is a wine-guzzling mother who lectures her daughter against her heroin 1 use, hypocritically sending her to an extremely expensive "treatment" facility whose bare-bones protocol consists of dumping the 'patient' on a cot and giving them a shot of Naltrexone, without so much as one godsend medicine to help them in their suffering. The movie reinforces the bogus notion that drugs are evil and that the answer to their use is a hypocritically defined sobriety. Of course, if Glenn Close wanted to experience MORE than four good days with her daughter, she would let the kid continue using heroin until such time as she's able to use any drug in the world to veer herself off that drug if and when she so desires (preferably with the help of a pharmacologically savvy empath). But the film promotes the superstitious idea that outlawed drugs are bad in and of themselves so drugs cannot be used to fix the young lady's problems. The result? Family spats drag on in the face of endless relapses and dubious promises to reform. The good news is, the prohibition that causes these problems generates no-doubt much-needed employment for addiction mongers, those whose workload depends on the outlawing of godsend medicines.
"COPS" -- WARNING: PROMOTES DRUG WAR RACISM: Glorifies2 the mistreatment of minorities in the name of the hateful Drug War. Parents, be sure to block junior's eyes and ears whenever the cops are hassling kids for using substances of which politicians disapprove, many of which grow at our feet and have inspired entire religions in the past.
Notes:
1: 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)
2: Glorifying Beneficial Drug Use DWP (up)
Ten Tweets
against the hateful war on US
Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.
Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!
Most psychoactive substance use can be judged as recreational OR medicinal OR both. The judgements are not just determined by the circumstances of use, either, but also by the biases of those doing the judging.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
Brits have a right to die, but they do not have the right to use drugs that might make them want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of the many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world.
It is consciousness which, via perception, shapes the universe into palpable forms. Otherwise it's just a chaos of particles. The very fact that you can refer to "the sun" shows that your senses have parsed the raw data into a specific meaning. "We" make this universe.
Mayo Clinic is peddling junk. They are still promoting Venlafaxine, a drug that is harder to kick than heroin.
The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.
Saying "Fentanyl kills" is philosophically equivalent to saying "Fire bad!" Both statements are attempts to make us fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as safely as possible for human benefit.
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.
Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us
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Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass
Contact: quass@quass.com
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