Paradise Wasn't Lost

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Paradise Wasn't Lost

It was abandoned by drug prohibitionists who wanted to make guns relevant again

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 7, 2026

Last night I thought I'd get my mind off of drug prohibition by watching a Spanish-language thriller on the Canela+ streaming channel. I wanted to forget about the fact that the regime in Washington, D.C. was killing drug suspects without a trial, nay, without so much as charging them with crimes. Sixty-seven boats have been profiled and bombed in the last year, resulting in 221 deaths.¹ I am trying to do my part to fight back in the name of basic human rights, but no one can be an activist 24/7. I just wanted to play the couch potato for a couple of hours and enjoy myself, secure in the knowledge that I was increasing my linguistic skills while doing so. So thinking, I scoured the listings on the platform in search of the desired titillation, trying to ignore the fact that Canela+ had recently begun giving pride of place to Voz News in their digital listings. "That's all we need," I thought to myself, "a new media outlet designed to teach Hispanics how to hate democracy and to worship strongmen." I made a mental note to boycott Penske Media (publishers of Rolling Stone magazine) and Comcast, both of which, as I had recently discovered, were major shareholders in this new venture to destroy democracy around the world. Of course, by rights, I should be boycotting Canela+ itself, but I am not yet ready to become a total hermit, cut off from all video entertainment whatsoever. The time may come, however. The same money-grubbing corporations that stoked the flames of insurrection in 2021 are now taking over the mainstream media. This is why I no longer get my news from America's network television but look instead to the Brits at Sky News to tell me what's going on on my side of the Atlantic.

Notwithstanding these distractions, I found a promising 2016 "pelicula" entitled Paraiso Perdido,² literally "Paradise Lost," not to be confused with the 2014 subtitle of that name attached to the Latino thriller involving Pablo Escobar. I should mention, however, by way of spoiler alert, that such confusion would be all too understandable given the plots involved. And therein lies a problem.

I had read multiple Spanish-language synopses of Paraiso Perdido, and I was intrigued. This threesome of young people sail to an apparently deserted island, only to encounter some "gran secreto" which will have them struggling for their lives. "Now, that's my kind of movie," I thought to myself, "the kind that keeps you guessing. I wonder what that big secret could possibly be?" Of course, in retrospect, I realized that this was a silly question, especially since the film begins by admonishing the viewer that the plot is based on real events. I should have just asked myself: "What is the big secret LIKELY to be on a seemingly deserted island in the Caribbean given the fact that the world has outlawed intensely desired substances?" But the obvious answer did not come to my mind, at least not during the first 30 minutes of the film, probably because I was subconsciously "hoping against hope" that the movie would not end up being about what I feared it might be about. True, the movie opened with the cold-blooded murder of an exhausted man at the hands of a machine-gun-wielding psycho with a bag over his head, but I was thinking that this gunman could have been shipwrecked on the island for years and had become "feral" as a result, or that he was part of a religious cult that executes visitors who fail to abide by 16th-century standards of Puritan morality while on the island. Or maybe the madman was in cahoots with the nearest alcalde on the mainland and was executing the latter's political rivals who had been sent there under the impression that they were being treated to a free vacation. I refused to even think of the "D" word. I was watching this movie to get away from drug prohibition, after all.

Spoiler Alert

Well, spoiler alert, folks: The "gran secreto" on the island turned out to be...

wait for it...

that the island was being used by drug dealers to store their money and drugs!

WHAT?! Now, who would have thought of THAT?

ANSWER: Every sane person on Planet Earth. This is what drug prohibition has brought about, after all. This is what happens when you outlaw intensely desired substances.

I need hardly tell you that the drug dealers in this real-life movie were exceptionally ruthless. When the villain from act one located the trio on the beach, he bashed the female lead to the ground with his machine-gun and then placed his army boot on her head, threatening to crush it as the woman's husband and brother looked on in helpless horror. The bad guy soon metes out similar punishment to the two men before hauling the bloodied woman off into the woods and tying her to a tree beside some makeshift shelving containing communication equipment. I need not give the details of the action that ensues. Suffice it to say that the trio soon gets the upper hand thanks to the intervention of the woman's brother (during which the husband takes a bullet to the stomach, from which he eventually dies). Unfortunately, however, there are a dozen more bad guys on their way, for it turns out that the distress call that the vacationers thought that they had sent out to the maritime authorities had been answered instead by the bad guys themselves. A well-armed paramilitary force soon arrives on the island, determined to find and kill the trespassers and to recoup the money that the heroine's brother had unwisely pocketed prior to grasping the full implications of the existence of such a treasure trove on a seemingly deserted Caribbean island. It was obviously drug money, and that meant that torture and gunfire awaited anyone who touched it, though, of course, the bad guys scarcely needed such a reason to kill the trio with extreme prejudice: their mere discovery of the island and its purposes more than qualified them for immediate death.

Let there be violence on Earth

By the time I realized that the bad guys were just your run-of-the-mill drug dealers, I was already halfway through the film and so I decided not to exercise my option of turning the TV off in a huff. Sure, the subject of drugs was in the background, but the foreground involved an exciting game of cat and mouse that one could enjoy "in abstracto," so to speak -- provided that one did not stop to think how unnecessary the whole charade was in the first place, how it was manufactured out of whole cloth by the enormous financial incentives provided by drug prohibition.

It was not until the credits began to roll that I found leisure to reflect on what the story had to tell us about that hateful policy, for the takeaway message was clear -- or it at least it would be to any westerners who have not been bamboozled by the full-court press of drug-related propaganda and censorship to which they have been subject since childhood -- namely that, "when you outlaw strongly desired substances, you promote torture and murder." That sentence is worth repeating: When you outlaw strongly desired substances, you promote torture and murder! Did you hear that, Drug Warriors? Did you hear that, you well-meaning and otherwise great people who are afraid of Mother Nature's medicines and who want to teach your kids to fear them rather than to learn how to use them as wisely and safely as possible for the benefit of humanity? Where are the closet prohibitionists in the room? I'm talking to YOU!

Of course, Drug Warriors will try to flip the script. They'll tell me that people like myself are responsible for the fate of someone who misuses a drug. If they can't handle Mother Nature's medicines, then it's somehow my fault for not putting them off-limits. I respond that they themselves must answer for the fate of someone who has their face crushed in by an army boot belonging to a paramilitary thug. They themselves must answer for the extreme violence brought into the world by drug prohibition. They themselves must answer in particular for the no-go zones that exist in every big city around the globe today -- and in many of the smaller cities as well -- no-go zones that are entirely due to drug prohibition, entirely. I'm talking about those graffiti-riddled dead zones where drug gangs compete for turf thanks to the economic incentives created by drug law.

But there is always hope for a bamboozled American with a good heart. Today's real enemies are the hardcore racist and xenophobic Drug Warriors. The same kind of people who created these laws in the first place are now invoking the "final solution" for the problems that they themselves have created: they are simply bombing and killing their custom-made bad guys without any judicial process whatsoever, brazenly murdering them, apparently under the notion that the existence of a metaphorical war against drugs justifies real killing in the real world. And why? Why are they doing this? We are told that this is all done in order to keep Americans safe from Mother Nature's bounty. And who is telling us this? Who is keeping us safe? Why, the exact same politicians who believe that there cannot be enough guns on city streets and that any attempt to limit their omnipresence is tantamount to communism. These are the beer-drinking hypocrites who are milking every drop of democracy-busting juice out of the hateful prohibitionist ideology that we supposedly abandoned almost 100 years ago now. But, of course, we never ended prohibition. In an act of breathtaking irony, we simply removed prohibition from liquor and applied it to every single one of liquor's competitors when it comes to substances that provide self-transcendence.

And let it begin with the DEA

The fact is, conservatives love drug problems. It gives them something upon which to crack down. It gives them a reason to use the military and police forces and to build new prisons to house minorities. See "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" to learn some of the appalling strategies that the DEA uses to create drug problems so that they can then ride in on a white horse to crack down on them. ³

Black Panther H. Rap Brown was right: "Violence is as American as cherry pie." We Americans watch the gun battles of drug dealers on TV for the same reason that the ancient Romans watched slaves fight in gladiator contests in the Coliseum: we do so in order to derive entertainment out of our society's respective vices. It truly seems that our gun-toting and beer-bellied conservatives created drug prohibition because they missed the Wild West (or at least the Wild West as portrayed by Hollywood) and wanted to create a world like that in modern times: a world in which guns were relevant again, not just for the police but for the average upstanding white man on the street as well. And what better way to make guns relevant again in America than to take the unprecedented step of outlawing all the desired psychoactive substances of Mother Nature, thereby incentivizing "bad players" to enter the market. In so doing, they are creating custom-made bad guys for a trigger-happy public. Of course, such a scheme will inevitably destroy poor inner cities given the economic incentives that it creates for a quick buck (or a quick megabuck), but the gun-happy prohibitionists do not care; to the contrary, they profit from the felonies that are subsequently produced by these laws insomuch as they remove minority opponents from the voting rolls. They know that Americans are basically puritans when it comes to psychoactive substances and so will be more than ready to blame mind-altering drugs themselves for the problems that their prohibition causes. In other words, drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime.

Spoiler Alert 2

Final spoiler alert: This woman, aka Sofia (played by Ana Claudia Talancón), is the only "good guy" to survive. She manages to zoom off in a motorized inflatable while the thugs were looking elsewhere. She drifts at sea after her engine runs out of gas, during which time she opens a satchel belonging to her brother. She laughs uncontrollably when she discovers that it contains the wads of cash to which her brother had helped himself on the island. This, of course, was before he was gunned down by a lookout who had been stationed on the trio's sailboat toward which the hapless brother had been swimming. [Yes, this will be on the test!] Sofia is finally rescued in the morning by a trio of friendly fishermen who bring her aboard their skiff before heading back to the mainland. In the final shot, we see Sofia gazing ahead, misty-eyed, hair flying in the wind, as she clasps the satchel of ill-begotten booty to her chest.

"The bombs bursting in air over speedboats whose occupants haven't even been charged with a crime..."

This movie should be shown at schools, after which the students should be asked to give the "moral" of the story. Their answers would go a long way toward telling us exactly how bamboozled young people have become thanks to drug prohibition and the censorship of all positive talk about drugs. That is a question that I would be afraid to ask students, however. I fear that most of them these days would consider the moral of the movie to be that drugs are bad and that drug dealers are the absolute worst people ever! In other words, most of the students' answers would gladden the hearts of racist politicians everywhere, politicians whose MO is to blame every social problem on drugs. I see such stories quite differently, of course. I see bad guys in the story, too, of course -- but the bad guys I see are the politicians who brought about this dystopia in the first place by passing drug laws that incentivized torture and violence. They are the real Drug Kingpins that we should be targeting, not by bombing them with our Coast Guard cutters before so much as charging them with a crime, but by the democratic expedient of removing them from office and then holding them responsible for the lives that they have taken in defiance of all norms of national and international law.. They are the ones who deserve our contempt, not the dupes whom they have tempted into a life of crime with the mad incentives that result when we outlaw time-honored substances.

Paradise Lost, indeed. This Paradise was not lost; it was abandoned by racist white American politicians who wanted us to live in a world in which guns were relevant again.

Notes:

1: “Drug Policy Alliance.” 2000. Drug Policy Alliance. https://drugpolicy.org/. (up)
2: “Paradise Paraiso.” n.d. The Internet Movie Database. Amazon. Accessed August 7, 2026. https://www.imdb.com/es/title/tt5112348/. (up)
3: Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State Miller, Richard Lawrence, 1996 (up)

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People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.

No substance is bad in and of itself. Fentanyl has positive uses, at specific doses, for specific people, in specific situations. But the drug war votes substance up or down. That is hugely anti-scientific and it blocks human progress.

We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for those who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.

No wonder conservatives are terrified of drugs. It is not safety that worries them, else they would demand education. They are terrified of new ways of seeing life. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of whole mindsets. It is a meta injustice.

Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.

Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"

There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.

I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.

Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.

It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.

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(up)

Paradise Wasn't Lost

It was abandoned by drug prohibitionists who wanted to make guns relevant again

Spoiler Alert

Let there be violence on Earth

And let it begin with the DEA

Spoiler Alert 2

"The bombs bursting in air over speedboats whose occupants haven't even been charged with a crime..."

Ten Tweets

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