There's 'No Escape' from the downsides of drug prohibition
A philosophical review of the 2015 action thriller starring Owen Wilson and Pierce Brosnan
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
December 11, 2025
In the 2015 action thriller "No Escape," Owen Wilson stars as Jack, an American expat whose family is threatened by the sudden unleashing of rabid anti-western sentiment in some fictitious Arab country. After having improbably escaped with his wife and two young daughters from two high-rises, both of them surrounded by an angry mob, the middle-aged engineer receives some last-minute help from a scruffy and enigmatic British "tourist" named Hammond, played by Pierce Brosnan.
In the 2015 movie 'No Escape', the safest place in the city was the opium den, where people were not interested in murdering Americans wholesale. Opium smoker also do not beat their wives, as do beer drinkers.
But I will leave the movie review to the professional critics, the vast majority of whom never complain about cinematic drug bashing nor the violation of Constitutional norms in the name of fighting against the politically created boogieman called "drugs."1 I am just a philosopher who wishes to make a point about America's counterproductive attitude about drugs by asking a simple question about the movie "No Escape," to wit:
QUESTION: Where does Hammond take the family in order to ensure their safety?
ANSWER: To an opium den, of course!!
That's right, Hammond escorted the trio away from the recently bombed-out American Embassy and toward the slightly less bombed-out brothel-and-opium den nearby. And believe it or not, nobody complained about that itinerary. Jack's wife Annie did not mount a Christian Science high horse and shout: "Jack, these people are using drugs, for God's sake! I think we should take our chances out on the street amongst the whirring bullets! What kind of message does this send to our kids, that we should seek refuge in a flipping opium den, of all places! It makes a mockery of our frequent admonitions for them to 'just say no!'"
But of course there was method to Hammond's madness. Hammond hadn't lived amongst the hoi polloi here for nothing. He understood that opium smokers did not go out and search for victims to line up on the road in order to run them down with a truck. No, nightly opium smokers were generally content with living their own lives, thank you very much. They had no great burning desire to fire a machine-gun from a helicopter at a rooftop full of scurrying American tourists, children included. An opium den was indeed the safest place in the bullet-riddled town.
How ironic! The plot of this movie basically happened in real life back in 1979 during the Iran Hostage Crisis. There was a rabid upswelling of anti-American sentiment in Tehran at that time as well. And guess who outlawed opium in Iran, the opium whose use could have moderated the screaming ferocity of those young men who paraded in front of the cameras while burning American flags? Opium was outlawed -- need I say -- by the hated Shah of Iran at the "request" of the United States of America!
And so brainwashed Americans ask, "Why are these people so hateful in their protests?" It is precisely because Americans prefer hatred to drug use. It is as simple as that.
The locals were responding to what they perceived as interference in their lives from America. Little did they realize that the greatest American interference of all was our decision on their behalf to outlaw their time-honored use of opium, thereby denying them a godsend medicine whose use could moderate their rage and turn it down more constructive pathways. There can be no greater interference in a person's life than for someone else to tell them how they are allowed to FEEL about their world!
And so, as so often happens in world affairs, Americans were hoisted by their own petard thanks to their childish, ahistorical and superstitious attitude toward time-honored substances.
AFTERTHOUGHT
I must remind the reader here that the Summers of Love on both sides of the Atlantic were outlawed by drug prohibitionists. They saw nothing good about peace, love and understanding. 23 All they saw were people using evil drugs -- LSD on this side of the Atlantic in the 1960s and Ecstasy on the British side in the 1990s 45. They hated drugs just like the cave people hated fire: they wanted to fear dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them wisely for the benefit of human beings.
The fact is, Americans are so bamboozled by a lifetime of drug-bashing that they actually prefer gunfire, violence and the destruction of civil liberties over the use of time-honored medicines like opium!
And yet even the most open-minded Americans have been brainwashed into calling opium a "hard drug." Of course it's hard. It's hard because it works -- just like cocaine -- and that means the medical establishment is terrified of it! The medical industry would be downsized by 50% if opium and cocaine were re-legalized, and the industry will fight that common-sense desiderata with every penny in their well-funded healthcare advocacy campaigns on corporate-owned media. And yet it's not just opium and cocaine6 we're talking about here: all dangerous substances -- like fire and Botox -- can be used wisely, notwithstanding the slanderous defeatism of the Drug Warriors, who would have Americans remain children for life when it comes to drugs. That's why I have to see a doctor every three months of my life for a refill of a drug that I have been taking for 40 long years: because I STILL cannot be trusted to use the drug wisely without medical oversight7!
But that is drug prohibition for you: it is an exercise in infantilization. It brings about the complete disempowerment of Americans when it comes to taking care of their own health as they see fit, which, believe it or not, was historically considered the most basic of human rights! Thomas Jefferson knew, moreover, that we had a natural right to the plants and fungi that grow at our very feet.
"The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.8"
These are the words of Jefferson's "go-to" man on the subject of natural law, John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government.
And so drug prohibition is a crime twice over: first, it denies us our natural right to heal, and it denies us our natural right to the bounty of Mother Nature.
Drug prohibition is thus nothing less than a crime against humanity.
Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.
Rick Strassman isn't sure that DMT should be legal. Really?! Does he not realize how dangerous it is to chemically extract DMT from plants? In the name of safety, prohibitionists have encouraged dangerous ignorance and turned local police into busybody Nazis.
There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.
I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that drug prohibition is wrong.
Reagan paid a personal price for his idiocy however. He fell victim to memory loss from Alzheimer's, after making a career out of demonizing substances that can grow new neurons in the brain!
The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.
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.
That's right, Hammond escorted the trio away from the recently bombed-out American Embassy and toward the slightly less bombed-out brothel-and-opium den nearby. And believe it or not, nobody complained about that itinerary. Jack's wife Annie did not mount a Christian Science high horse and shout: "Jack, these people are using drugs, for God's sake! I think we should take our chances out on the street amongst the whirring bullets! What kind of message does this send to our kids, that we should seek refuge in a flipping opium den, of all places! It makes a mockery of our frequent admonitions for them to 'just say no!'"
(up)