thought I'd watch "Smile 2" last night since I had found "Smile 1" reasonably enjoyable. This was a mistake, however, because the opening scene was pure Drug War agitprop. It was clearly written to advance the notion that drugs are the problem, not prohibition.
The movie begins with the efforts of a livid vigilante to punish a drug dealer whose recent gunplay had inadvertently killed a woman and her young child. Sure, that's evil -- no one likes a wanton killer. But how much more evil were the politicians and other demagogues who created a world in which such people do such things?!
We did not have Americans torturing each other and firing guns carelessly in public before the War on Drugs incentivized such extreme violence. And yet movies like "Smile 2" keep reinforcing the idea that drugs and drug dealers are the problem, not prohibition, that we have only to crack down hard enough -- with vigilantes, if needed -- and the problem will go away, nay, that it is our duty to crack down and to erase drug dealers from the face of the earth.
Just think about what the Drug War has done here. Think about the movies that you've seen which feature extreme torture and extreme disregard for human life. Chances are that the vast majority of their plots concerned drug dealing.
Does anyone see what's going on here? Substance prohibition has created the violence on which these movies are all-too-accurately based. And this is inexcusable because common sense psychology tells us that prohibition would do precisely this. People like to get rich and there will always be a morally challenged minority which will go to extreme measures when extreme incentives are offered thanks to insane social policies like prohibition.
This is another reason why the FDA is enormously biased when it comes to drug approval. Not only do they ignore the obvious positive effects of the drugs that they bash, but they also ignore the obvious negative effects of outlawing drugs. The FDA is supposedly all about keeping us safe, right? And yet by outlawing drugs, they are enabling torture and wholesale murder!
And yet no one sees this -- nor will they ever see this thanks to movies like "Smile 2"!
Schopenhauer says that the truth will eventually be known, but I am beginning to wonder.
I never thought of myself as a great genius, but the idiocy of the vast majority on these topics is beginning to swell my head. Either I am a genius, being the only one to recognize these obvious syllogistic truths, or there are a fair percentage of people out there who "get this" but are just not speaking up -- or else they are hiding their knowledge in academic-speak. Academic Philip Jenkins wrote about the Drug War in "Synthetic Panics1" in reasonably lucid prose, but his work has had limited effect for two reasons: 1) He refrained from drawing any overt conclusions from the data that he had amassed, and 2) He gave his book a title that did not even mention "drugs." In other words, he shielded himself from mainstream criticism, but only at the cost of diminishing the impact of his book.
Even factual and assumption-free movies about drug-related deaths are propaganda in the age of the Drug War. They may not be propaganda "in and of themselves," but collectively they are part of an obvious propaganda campaign -- a campaign of censorship designed to make us associate drugs with nothing but death, dying and dead-end streets.
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.
Schopenhauer synthesizes the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Plato with the philosophy of eastern religions, according to which we human beings are unable to perceive Reality writ large. This limitation, however, which both Schopenhauer and Kant suggest applies to all human beings as such, may actually only apply to "sober" individuals, as William James was to point out a decade after Schopenhauer's death. James realized that the strategic use of drugs that provide self-transcendence can help one see past the so-called Veil of Maya. He went so far as to insist that philosophers must use such substances in an effort to understand ultimate realities -- advice that, alas, most modern philosophers seem committed to ignoring.
"No account of the universe in its totality," wrote James, "can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
The exciting thing now is to consider Schopenhauer's philosophy in light of the revelations provided by certain drug use and to assess how such epiphanies tend to confirm, qualify or perhaps even refute the German pessimist's ideas about an eternal and unchangeable will, a will which the philosopher tells us is manifested in (or rather manifested AS) objects, animals, plants and persons. Schopenhauer tells us that the will corresponding to these entities is purposeful, for it seeks to create a specific kind of object or individual, but that the will is also meaningless, in the sense that the fact that it IS a specific kind of will is an arbitrary given, to which we need not ascribe any purpose, let alone a creator.
I am still trying to wrap my head around that latter claim, by the way, the idea that there can be teleology without design. I think I am slowly beginning to understand what Schopenhauer means by that claim in light of Kantian distinctions, but I am by no means sure that I agree with him. Yet I am not qualified to push back at this time. Further reading is required on my part before I can either refute him advisedly, or else concede his point. I do find, however, that Schopenhauer occasionally makes definitive-sounding claims that are actually quite open to obvious refutations.
In "The World as Will and Idea," for instance, he states that tropical birds have brilliant feathers "so that each male may find his female." Really? Then why are penguins not decked out with technicolor plumage? To assign "final causes" like this to nature is to turn animals into the inkblots of a biological Rorschach test. Not only is Schopenhauer being subjective here, but he has an agenda in making this particular kind of claim: he wants to underscore his belief that there is a logical causative explanation behind the fact that "wills" of the tropical birds would manifest in this colorful way, that it was not some act of extravagance on the part of a whimsical creator. But this kind of explanation is not the least bit compelling since one can imagine dozens of equally plausible "final causes" for the feature in question: the birds want to attract mates, the birds want to warn off predators, the birds want to mimic other yellow birds, the birds want to collectively camouflage themselves while roosting as one big yellow object (or more accurately, the birds' wills want to do these things).
One senses that Schopenhauer would respond as follows: "Fine. Give any reason you like, Ballard. But whatever you do, do not tell me that some suppositious God likes variety!"
And what about this famous pessimism? It's so typical of curmudgeons to try to make a universal law out of their own psychological issues. Schopenhauer does not seem to understand that attitude matters. As Hamlet said, "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." It is neither the shortness of life nor the inhumanity of our fellows that ruins life for most people -- but rather their attitude TOWARD such circumstances. Every manic-depressive knows that a blue sky and party cake does not make a person happy, nor living amid postcard scenery. One can commit suicide in Disneyland just as well as Skid Row. It is attitude, attitude, attitude that matters -- from which it follows that it is a sin to outlaw substances that can help us adopt a positive attitude toward life. That's why it's so frustrating that philosophers like Schopenhauer pretend that life can be judged by circumstances alone. Only once we acknowledge that attitude matters can we clearly see the importance of the many mind-improving medicines of which Mother Nature is full, the meds that we slander today by classing them under the pejorative label of "drugs."
Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.
It's depressing. I thought mycology clubs across the US would be protesting drug laws that make mushroom collecting illegal for psychoactive species. But in reality, almost no club even mentions such species. No wonder prohibition is going strong.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
Science keeps telling us that godsends have not been "proven" to work. What? To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.
Laughing gas is the substance that gave William James his philosophy of reality. He concluded from its use that what we perceive is just a fraction of reality writ large. Yet his alma mater (Harvard) does not even MENTION laughing gas in their bio of the man.
I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!
Check out the 2021 article in Forbes in which a materialist doctor professes to doubt whether laughing gas could help the depressed. Materialists are committed to seeing the world from the POV of Spock from Star Trek.
We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.
It's no wonder that folks blame drugs. Carl Hart is the first American scientist to openly say in a published book that even the so-called "hard" drugs can be used wisely. That's info that the drug warriors have always tried to keep from us.
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, Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood: how movies toe the line with prohibition ideology, published on January 14, 2025 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)
thought I'd watch "Smile 2" last night since I had found "Smile 1" reasonably enjoyable. This was a mistake, however, because the opening scene was pure Drug War agitprop. It was clearly written to advance the notion that drugs are the problem, not prohibition. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Drug War Propaganda from Hollywood: how movies toe the line with prohibition ideology, published on January 14, 2025 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)
