'The Runner' by Jason Chase shows the Drug War at its racist best.
The screenplay tries to make a villain out of the usual suspects, including the obligatory coke-dealing Hispanic Drug Dealer, "Local Legend," and his black teenage admirer, Blake. But the real villain of the piece is Detective Wall, the smug and self-righteous drug agent, who...
1) calls Aiden's black teenage friend "a scumbag, not worth another thought," and wants to lock him up for 20 years.
2) ignores Aiden's request for a lawyer, saying, "Guilty people want lawyers."
3) slaps the teenage Aiden repeatedly, telling him, "I own you, you f - -, you waste!"
This un-American (indeed Nazi-like) law enforcement makes sense only if we believe the Drug War lie that plant medicine is pure evil, but that's wrong! God himself said his creation was good, both as to flora and fauna. Jules Verne and HG Wells wrote their best work under the influence of coca wine. Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin enjoyed opium. The entire Vedic-Hindu religion was inspired by the psychoactive effects of a plant, and Plato's views about the afterlife were inspired by his participation in the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian mysteries.
And yet Jason Chase has made a movie that glorifies the trigger-happy gunmen who bash down doors to stop people from using plants that grow at their very feet, thereby supporting a Drug War that has caused a civil war in Mexico, turned America's inner cities into shooting galleries, and empowered a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines.
Jason fails to realize that the negative events depicted in his film only take place because America has decided to demonize psychoactive plant medicine rather than learning how to use it wisely for the benefit of humanity, which, despite drug-war lies, has always sought self-transcendence and self-improvement with mother nature's plant medicines - and we seek to quash that impulse at our own peril.
Please, Jason, America does not need more films that glorify SWAT teams: America needs films that promote facts not fear, and education not criminalization.
If you're worried about addiction, Jason, what about the record-breaking 1 in 4 American women in the US who are chemically dependent on Big Pharma meds, many harder to kick than heroin, which they have to take every single day of their life??? That's the biggest addiction in human history!!! Why don't we break down THEIR doors and haul THEM downtown and call THEM "scumbags" and "waste"? Why don't we say that THEY'RE "not worth another thought"? Likewise with those who use liquor, which kills 400,000 people a year - or tobacco, which kills 95,000 a year.
We don't break down their doors and shout "Go, go, go!" And why not? Because the Drug War is a political war against minorities, not a war against the powers-that-be. It's a shame that in the third decade of the 21st century, Americans still don't get this, and that we are still making movies like this that celebrate our imperialist and racist war against psychoactive plant medicine.
Oh, and spoiler alert: remember that black teenager who was selling plant medicine of which politicians disapprove? He was shot dead in the gunfire that erupted as the SWAT team stormed in. (Detective Wall only wanted to throw the teenager in jail, but this works too, since either way, he's been taken off the voting rolls so that conservatives and Drug Warriors can continue to triumph at the polls.)
Agent Burrell had warned against the raid, suggesting that teenagers might get killed, but Captain Ames indignantly dismissed his worry, for the totally irrelevant reason that "thousands of lives are endangered by this crew."
"Really?" one wants to say in response. So what? That doesn't mean that you have to arrest them in the most violent and dramatic fashion imaginable! Fortunately for the SWAT team, the middle-aged Hispanic dealer was also killed in the raid, so at least the SWAT team can boast about something more than killing children.
Detective Wall, who apparently got a bad scratch during the raid (aww!), actually wins a medal for killing teenagers. A medal, he says, "is so no one questions whether it was a worthwhile cause."
Well, the medal didn't work this time, Wall. This reviewer, at least, questions the wisdom of your cause, for the Drug War that you champion goes against everything that America is meant to stand for, by demonizing teenagers, criminalizing plant medicine, incentivizing dealing, and holding the safeguards of the US Constitution in supreme contempt.
I dare say that Thomas Jefferson would agree with me, since he was rolling in his grave when the DEA stormed onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants, in violation of the natural law upon which the garden-loving president had founded America.
The Links Police
Why do you think I stopped you? That's right, because it would have been a crime for you to leave without at least perusing some additional pics and 'says on the topic of Drug War and minorities. Sad that today, when minorities are beaten for selling drugs, their so-called defenders cheer on the police. They (Jesse Jackson Sr., Bill Clinton and company) have yet to grok the simple truth made so evident during liquor prohibition, namely that prohibition leads to violence.
Author's Follow-up: August 31, 2022
If you ever see a quartet of self-satisfied cops holding a press conference about the latest drug bust, do me a favor and boo. The police should have nothing to do with substance use. If someone misses a dose of their antibiotic, do we have the cops come break down their door? No more should they do so when we're discussing the pharmacological improvement of mood and mind.
So, bug off, copper! Go help some little old lady across the street or stop a terrorist attack, and stop scapegoating "drugs" for every social problem in the world.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.
Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.
It's always wrong to demonize drugs in the abstract. That's anti-scientific. It begs so many questions and leaves suffering pain patients (and others) high and dry. No substance is bad in and of itself.
Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!
By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.
The line drawn between recreational and medical use is wishful thinking on the part of drug warriors. Recreation, according to Webster's, is "refreshment or diversion," and both have positive knock-on effects in the lives of real people.
Attention People's magazine editorial staff:
Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.
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, Black Lives Don't Matter: in 'The Runner' by Jason Chase, published on April 2, 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)
Why do you think I stopped you? That's right, because it would have been a crime for you to leave without at least perusing some additional pics and 'says on the topic of Drug War and minorities. Sad that today, when minorities are beaten for selling drugs, their so-called defenders cheer on the police. They (Jesse Jackson Sr., Bill Clinton and company) have yet to grok the simple truth made so evident during liquor prohibition, namely that prohibition leads to violence.
You have been reading an article entitled, Black Lives Don't Matter: in 'The Runner' by Jason Chase, published on April 2, 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)