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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)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.

I passed a sign that says "Trust Trump." What does that mean? Trust him to crack down on his opposition using the U.S. Army? Or trust him not to do all the anti-American things that he's saying he's going to do.

M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.

I will gladly respect the police once we remove them from Gestapo duty by ending the war on drugs. Police should also learn to live on a budget, without deriving income from confiscating houses and dormitories, etc.

Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau

That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.

Big pharma drugs are designed to be hard to get off. Doctors write glowingly of "beta blockers" for anxiety, for instance, but ignore that fact that such drugs are hard -- and even dangerous -- to get off. We have outlawed all sorts of less dependence-causing alternatives.

To say that taking SSRIs daily is better than using opium daily is a value judgement, not a scientific one.

We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.


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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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Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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