bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter


The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop

by Brian 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 Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop
Time to ACT UP about the racist drug war
Twelve 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
  • 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




    Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice. The media has played its role with movies like "Running with the DEA," "The Crisis" and "The Runner." In the first of these three, the DEA are the "good guys" for murdering a suspect in cold blood. In the second, the DEA plants evidence to cover up the murder of a drug suspect by an indignant mother. And in the third, a white detective stages a raid that kills a young Black teenager that said detective refers to as "a waste of space."

    The Drug War is all about making us hate -- making us hate anybody except for the folks that brought about the violence and drug problems in the first place: the damned prohibitionists who, having failed to outlaw liquor, turned their scapegoating on every less dangerous substance in the world.

    Meanwhile, the media have done all they can to support this 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.

  • 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
  • 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
  • Attention American Screenwriters: please stop spreading Drug War propaganda
  • Colorado plane crash caused by milk!
  • Common Nonsense from Common Sense Media
  • 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 Hysteria and the Opioid Crisis
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drug War Quotes in TV and Movies
  • Fabricate at Will: editors give journalists free rein to lie about psychedelics
  • 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
  • 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
  • Potty-Mouth Drug Warriors
  • 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 Award for most biased reporting on psychedelic drugs in an online newspaper goes to…
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • 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





  • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    That's why I created the satirical Partnership for a Death Free America. It demonstrates clearly that drug warriors aren't worried about our health, otherwise they'd outlaw shopping carts, etc. The question then becomes: what are they REALLY afraid of? Answer: Free thinkers.

    The outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis"? The message is clear: people want self-transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.

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

    It is actually illegal to be a Ben Franklin in 21st century America. To put this another way: we outlaw far more than drugs when we outlaw mind and mood medicine.

    What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!

    The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.

    "The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals." -- Aleister Crowley on drug laws

    All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.

    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!"

    The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    Drug War Uber Alles
    Listening to Laughing Gas


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

    (up)