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Running with the DEA -- er, I mean the Devil

Review of Running with the Devil, starring Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne and Natalie Reyes

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 30, 2019



"Running with the Devil" is the latest Hollywood film to glamorize the perverse logic of America's Drug War, to celebrate the trampling of the U.S. Constitution and to glorify1 inquisitorial torture, all in the name of keeping Americans -- and the world -- safe from Mother Nature's plants.

Notice how the hypocritical DEA agent "hero" happily TORTURES her witness, and then has the nerve to tell a man who's selling NATURALLY-OCCURRING SUBSTANCES that he's "dirt."

Is this what American values have come to? Why is Leslie Bibb's character on a high horse when the Drug War is quashing research on valuable drugs for depression -- and single-handedly creating the violence that the DEA sets out to fight?

Hey, here's an idea: re-legalize MOTHER NATURE and then fight BAD BEHAVIOR, NOT PLANTS.

Don't Laurence Fishburne and Nicolas Cage have better things to do in Hollywood than produce propaganda for the DEA - an agency which steals elections for conservatives every year by locking up a million liberals for possessing naturally occurring substances and then taking those liberals off the voting rolls by turning them into felons?

U.S. elections aren't being swayed by the Russians, they're being stolen by American movie producers, including companies like Jaguar Bite and so-called Patriotic Pictures, who have done everything they can with this movie to bequeath DEA tyranny to their great grandchildren, by celebrating the perverse torture-friendly values of today's Drug Warriors.

The minister in the film laments that the fascist DEA agents' kin were lost to "this drug epidemic."

What drug epidemic? There is no more of a drug epidemic in America now than there was a drinking epidemic during prohibition. The drug impurities and violence that we wring our hands over are not a result of a drug epidemic -- they are a result of the Drug War itself, which drives the price of drugs through the roof, makes it impossible to ensure the purity of purchased substances, refuses to teach how to use drugs safely, and by criminalizing non-addictive psychoactive plants, the DEA makes it inevitable that those seeking medicines for their conscious state will end up on hard stuff.

Besides, the DEA has no right to talk about a drug epidemic since they completely ignore the great addiction of our time: the fact that 1 in 8 Americans are addicted FOR LIFE to Big Pharma 2 3 antidepressants 4.

The Drug Warrior doesn't give a good GD about addiction -- they just want the user to be paying their drug money to big pharma -- using their addictive meds rather than using non-addictive psychedelics that could improve one's life in just a few uses.

Hello? This is the DEA. How may I ruin your life and destroy your human potential by deliberately withholding plant medicines that are well-known to provide insight and a fresh way of thinking about the world?


And at the end of the film -- SPOILER ALERT -- the fascist DEA agent shoots the bad guy. This is what the war on patients -- the war on Mother Nature -- has done: it has turned Americans into supporters of torture and extra judicial killing. Why? Because we refuse to get the message that the Drug War itself is creating the violence that we're fighting.

It's time for the fascist DEA to step down -- to stop criminalizing Mother Nature's godsend medications -- to start showing a little compassion for the millions that have gone without godsend medicines for the last 50 years thanks to DEA lies about psychoactive substances.

The first step is for Hollywood to stop releasing Drug War propaganda like "Running with the Devil."

Oh, by the way: Agent Natalie was smoking a cigarette just before she "offed" the bad guy. Talk about hypocrisy.

One of the most deadly drugs in history -- she's sitting there smoking it! And yet she's in such a self-righteous state that she's ready to kill an unarmed suspect???

Please. We should make cigarette possession a felony and let Agent Natalie see what others go through when their go-to natural substance is criminalized.

In fact, if we must have a Drug War, then let's start by throwing callous Drug War hypocrites like William Bennett in the pokey indefinitely. Chimney pots like Billy kill countless people every year by second-hand smoke. Oh, and let's not neglect to take away his voting rights and forbid him from running for public office.

If he so much as desires a job at Dollar General, I want William Bennett to submit to a urine and saliva test for the presence of the slightest bit of tobacco in his system before he earns a cent.

Mind you, I'd prefer to end the anti-patient Drug War scam entirely, but if we're going to have one, let's start by running roughshod over the rights of the myriad hypocritical smokers and drinkers among the Drug War zealots.

But back to the disgraceful DEA propaganda film aka Running with the Devil.

This is a particularly disappointing movie, by the way, because it seems to show how little we've learned. There's been a psychedelic renaissance of sorts in the last 20 years, as science has actually been given at least a teensy bit of leeway to study psychedelics and show how incredibly useful they can be for depression and other mental conditions. Yet here we have a Hollywood 5 movie doing its best to reinforce the Drug War superstition that a plant becomes evil incarnate just because we had the chutzpah to criminalize it. It's about time we faced facts and stop letting politicians decide for their own selfish reasons what we should feel about nature's plants.

CHECK OUT THE horrible anti-American message of this movie. It is as follows:

The Drug War is still not working, so we need to crack down even harder?!

Still harder? We've already signed off on torture and murder and gotten rid of the first and fourth amendments to the US Constitution. Meanwhile, we're locking up so many leftists that conservatives now are stealing our elections. What is the end game here: total dictatorship?

And why? So that we can stop Americans from using natural plants to change their minds safely.

I hate to say it, but there's a kind of terrible poetic justice every time an ex-DEA agent starts moldering away in a retirement home, wishing they were dead. Too bad for them, because they have spent their lives keeping mind-easing medicines away from the American public -- so I don't want to hear one groan from them as they go miserably to their fate. They have worked all their lives to prevent minds from healing -- by outlawing Mother Nature. Now they must live with the consequences of their blind patient-hating ethics.

And even if they decide to end it all, they will not be able to gently nod off with the help of an immoderate dose of morphine 6 , because guess what, kids? They themselves have demonized morphine 7 so thoroughly that many hospitals no longer even carry the drug. And even if they do, it's the government that will ultimately decide whether such moribund DEA agents will be allowed to die, not the agents themselves. Good job, dimwit. You have forced your own self to go without the godsends of Mother Nature and put your very fate in the hands of faceless bureaucrats. Well done indeed.

Fortunately my better angels will never let me actually be as evil toward DEA agents as they have been toward the American public, especially minorities. But what can I say? If those DEA agents persecute drugs that can grow new neurons, what right do they have to complain when they or their loved ones start needlessly suffering from Alzheimer's 8 and dementia? They've lied about the substances for five decades and prohibited research and now they're going to lament the lack of progress in fighting brain diseases?

Well, if they want to stop and ask themselves why more hasn't been done in this area, I've got news for them: all they have to do is look in the mirror.


Author's Follow-up: August 30, 2022



What a fine, upstanding movie. Gotta love the part where the DEA agent gets on her high horse and spits on the local agent. He should have spit right back: "Hey, the stuff I'm sellin' is far less lethal than the alcohol and tobacco of which you so freely avail yourself."

Author's Follow-up: February 10, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


Coca, in fact, is a godsend from Mother Nature. The self-righteous DEA agent better re-read the Book of Genesis. The absurd outlawing of the mere coca leaf in Europe, UK and America has outlawed a godsend for depression. But being a prohibitionist means you never have to say you're sorry, you never have to take responsibility for the downsides of your anti-scientific policy: like the mass incarceration 9 of the young people around the globe that you have lured into lucrative drug dealing, the destruction of the rule of law in Latin America -- the fact that billions have to go without a godsend like the coca leaf because you insist that the coca plant must be judged by one single product derived from one single alkaloid of the plant -- and that therefore all other benefits of coca must be completely ignored until the end of time, even if this means that the depressed commit suicide 10 for want of the buoying powers of coca.

Meanwhile, the one and only company that gets to profit from the coca leaf in the states is Coca-Cola, which has flooded the Mexican market with its sugary product, thereby causing a diabetes-crisis that has taken tens of thousands of lives.

*drugwarmovies 11 12 *









Notes for essay entitled Running with the DEA -- er, I mean the Devil: Review of Running with the Devil, starring Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne and Natalie Reyes:

1: Glorifying Beneficial Drug Use DWP (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: 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)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
5: Blast-off for Planet Hypocrisy! DWP (up)
6: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
7: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
8: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
9: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
10: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
11: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
12: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

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Properly speaking, MDMA has killed no one at all. Prohibitionists were delighted when Leah Betts died because they were sure it was BECAUSE of MDMA/Ecstasy. Whereas it was because of the fact that prohibitionists refuse to teach safe use.

Conservatives say they're against Big Government -- but they let bureaucrats decide what medicines they can use.

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.

The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.

When Americans "obtain their majority" and wish to partake of drugs safely, they should be paired with older adults who have done just that. Instead, we introduce them to "drug abusers" in prerecorded morality plays to reinforce our biased notions that drug use is wrong.

I wonder if Nixon knew what a favor he was doing medical capitalism when he outlawed psychedelics. Those drugs can actually cure things, and there's no money in that.

Many psychedelic fans are still drug warriors at heart. They just think that a nice big exception should be carved out for the drugs that they're suddenly finding useful.

That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.

Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.

Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.


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