computer screen with words DRUG WAR BLOG bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter


The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop



by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher



September 10, 2022



Here's a review that Brian posted to IMDB for the disgraceful 2021 film "The Runner." If you share his sentiments, please do your part by slamming the flick's Nazified message in your own IMDB review.

If you want to see how the Drug War has caused Americans to turn their backs on civil rights and civil liberties, watch The Runner, a flick about a self-righteous detective who scorns the US constitution as he strong-arms a teenager into ratting on his friends.

When Aidan asks for a lawyer, Detective Wall tells him, "Guilty people want lawyers." When the detective talks about teenage drug dealers, he uses language that the Nazis once reserved for Jews. The detective calls Aidan's black teenage friend "a scumbag, not worth another thought" and vows to throw the kid in jail for 20 years. Wall doesn't get his way, but that is only because the SWAT team riddles the black kid's chest with bullets in a criminally irresponsible raid on a teenage drinking party. Was Detective Wall fired after the raid? No. In fact, he received an award. And for what? For keeping Americans from using a plant medicine that the Incas considered to be a God. The very fact that this passes for entertainment today shows how thoroughly Americans have been hoodwinked by the hysterical drug-war ideology of substance demonization.

Author's Follow-up: September 10, 2022



I say I posted this review, but I actually just submitted it. If it doesn't appear, it's just more Drug War censorship. I attempted to post a comment on Variety that was critical of this film and the form did not work -- nor did Variety respond to my ten emails when I tried to resolve the problem. It looks like Variety wants to do business as usual, without anybody calling them to account for their many uncritical reviews in which they give drug-war Nazism a complete pass. In this they're just like the media group Common Sense, which will send up flares if a movie features dirty words, but will give no warning whatsoever if a movie promotes racist drug-war tyranny, evidence-planting and torture by the DEA. Such activity apparently qualifies as family values in the age of the Drug War.

Author's Follow-up: September 26, 2022



Today, Twitter flagged one of my replies as being potentially offensive merely because I told the truth about the Drug War. Apparently, just using the word "drugs" in a non-facetious manner is now considered to be offensive. There are endless tweets in which Americans spout the usual disdain for "drugs," dutifully associating them with all things evil, in conformity with their Drug War indoctrination. But when one dares to suggest that "drugs" is a politically created term and that the substances we demonize should be understood instead, one is now considered to be offensive.

I guess Twitter would prefer that I upload funny cat photographs instead so that America can remain in denial about their anti-scientific and superstitious attitude toward the politically created category of substances known as "drugs."

It's days like this that I thank God for referendums and the state of Oregon, where they have decriminalized "drugs." Of course, this is only the first step in restoring sanity (along with natural law and the freedom of scientists) to American life, by elevating facts over fear and education over indoctrination. But such examples are necessary to show the indoctrinated Chicken Littles of the west that the sky does not fall down when we teach instead of arrest.


The Links Police


All right, buddy, do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me carte blanche to be a noxious busybody. But I also thought you might be interested in the following additional essays touching on fascism -- and also the need for the Holocaust Museum to speak out against the same -- at long last, be it said!!!

Why the Holocaust Museum must denounce the Drug War: The Unconstitutional Drug War has led Americans to dehumanize human beings simply because they sell substances of which scheming and hypocritical politicians disapprove
The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop: A celebration of anti-American values in the name of the hateful anti-scientific drug war.
Time to ACT UP about the racist drug war: Those of us who are 'woke' viz. the insidious nature of the Drug War need to steal a page from the ACT UP movement of the 1980s.
Twelve Signs of Early Fascism: The Drug War ticks all the boxes on the Holocaust Museum's 12 'signs of early fascism'

Drug War Movies






Hollywood supports the war on drugs by refusing to show wise use while always depicting drug use in the worst possible light. Like all media, they refuse to show beneficial use -- and if they're not depicting drugs as dangerous dead-ends, they're at least showing use to be frivolous and dangerous. The producers kowtow to drug warrior sensibilities.

  • All these Sons
  • Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
  • Cop shows as drug war propaganda
  • COPS: TV Show for Racist Drug Warriors
  • Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood
  • Glenn Close but no cigar
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • How Variety and its film critics support drug war fascism
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Moonfall
  • Running with the DEA -- er, I mean the Devil
  • Running with the torture loving DEA
  • She Devils and Substance Prohibition
  • The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop
  • Why Hollywood Owes Richard Nixon an Oscar

  • Mass Media and Drugs






    The media have done all they can to support the drug war by holding the use of outlawed substances to safety standards that are never applied to any other risky activity on earth, meanwhile ignoring the fact that prohibition encourages ignorance and leads to contaminated drug supply. Thousands of American young people die each month because of unregulated supply and ignorance, not from drugs themselves.

    The media also supports the drug war by failing to hold it accountable for all the problems that it causes. Just read any article on inner-city shootings -- today's journalists will trace the problem to a lack of jobs or to global warming, to anything but the drug war which incentivized violence in the first place. As for violence overseas, we're told that it's caused by evil rotten drug cartels -- without any acknowledgement that it was American drug policy that created those cartels out of whole cloth, just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia here in the States.

    Meanwhile, the media have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... It's all part of the DEA's tried-and-true formula to stay relevant, as academic Philip Jenkins clearly demonstrates in "Synthetic Panics": Take a local drug problem and publicize it so that it goes national. Then work with a film crew at "48 Hours" to show that the drug in question threatens the white American middle class. Then go to Congress, hat in hand, and accept billions to 'solve' the latest drug problem.

    And Americans fall for it every time. In fact, their gullibility seems to be increasing over time. They love to hate drugs, so much so that drugs have become the new horror trope. Recent movies have taken to personifying "evil" drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. It's sad that America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs -- and the media can take much of the blame.

  • Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
  • Colorado plane crash caused by milk!
  • Cop shows as drug war propaganda
  • COPS PRESENTS the top 10 traffic stops of 2023
  • COPS: TV Show for Racist Drug Warriors
  • Drug War Agitprop
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does!
  • Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
  • Glenn Close but no cigar
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the drug war
  • How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War
  • How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War Part II
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Jim Beam and Drugs
  • Matthew Perry and the Drug War Ghouls
  • More Weed Bashing at the Washington Post
  • Movie Warnings from Uncommon Sense
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II
  • Stigmatize THIS
  • The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop
  • The Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war lies
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Why CBS 19 should stop supporting the Drug War





  • computer screen with words DRUG WAR BLOG


    Next essay: Drug War Uber Alles
    Previous essay: Listening to Laughing Gas

    More Essays Here




    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
    We need to push back against the very idea that the FDA is qualified to tell us what works when it comes to psychoactive medicines. Users know these things work. That's what counts. The rest is academic foot dragging.
    It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?
    Drug prohibition is the biggest tyranny imaginable. It is the government control of pain relief. It is government telling us how and how much we are allowed to think and feel in this life.
    The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.
    It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
    Almost all talk about the supposed intractability of things like addiction are exercises in make-believe. The pundits pretend that godsend medicines do not exist, thus normalizing prohibition by implying that it does not limit progress. It's a tacit form of collaboration.
    The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a drug war collaborator. They helped the DEA confiscate Thomas Jefferson's poppy plants in 1987. They have refused to talk about that ever since.
    The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses and is known to cause death and destruction.
    This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
    More Tweets



    The latest hits from Drug War Records, featuring Freddie and the Fearmongers!


    1. Requiem for the Fourth Amendment



    2. There's No Place Like Home (until the DEA gets through with it)



    3. O Say Can You See (what the Drug War's done to you and me)






    front cover of Drug War Comic Book

    Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans



    You have been reading an article entitled, The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop published on September 10, 2022 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)