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Enough Drug War Propaganda Movies Already

review of the movie Du Zhan, aka Drug War

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher




February 20, 2021

The author continues his mission of writing movie reviews on the IMDB for all films that exploit the Drug War without pointing out that it is just plain wrong. This review was posted for the 2012 film entitled Drug War, aka Du zhan.


Drug War movies are just modern Gladiator Shows for American Drug Warriors. Producers of such films exploit the violence created by the absurd Drug War for personal gain. Americans, used to urinating for employment, fail to realize that the Drug War is simply the enforcement of Christian Science Sharia -- Christian Science: the religion that says we have a moral obligation to renounce the medicines of Mother Nature. The Drug War is corrupt. No other society has ever scapegoated substances like this to turn ordinary people into criminals. Producers should stop exploiting it. And movie reviewers should stop treating these movies as if the Drug War that prompted the action was somehow moral and common sense. Thomas Jefferson didn't think so -- and he was rolling in his grave when the DEA confiscated his poppy plants, the same DEA that has been lying about psychoactive plant medicine for the last 50 years. Enough Drug War propaganda movies, already.


August 23, 2022




Charming as this broadside no doubt was, it failed to get down to brass tacks viz. specific movie titles, no doubt because the hypersensitive author was so pissed by the tyrannical principle at play here that he pettishly recoiled from even contemplating such irritating specifics, let alone enumerating them, in the same way that the hypochondriacal Roderick Usher recoiled from hearing anything but the "peculiar sounds" of certain stringed instruments. So to demonstrate that Brian knew whereof he spoke (whereof he positively raved), we adduce the following recent feature titles which promote the drug-war ideology of substance demonization: Crisis, Running with the Devil, The Runner, and Four Good Days. These titles are the most obvious offenders that come to mind, but let's face it: almost any modern movie that mentions "drugs" (as that term is hypocritically defined by Drug Warriors) tends to promote drug-war ideology, if only by associating substance use with scoundrels and/or by otherwise enforcing the standard drug-war narrative that the use of demonized substances can only result in heartbreak and sorrow.

SPOILER ALERT: Warning! Pretty much any movie that involves arguments over a huge amount of cash is going to end up being a Drug War propaganda film at some point, if only by tacitly associating violence and hedonism with "drugs" (never mind the fact that the association is a product of the drug-war itself). I'm a bit of a horror buff myself, but I'm turned off when flicks gratuitously bring "drugs" into play, as in otherwise promising flicks like "Don't Say Its Name" and "When Darkness Falls." Take the latter Scottish-based title, for instance: The suspenseful and scenic caper had snagged my undivided attention for at least 80 of its 105-minute run time, but when that bag full of money was discovered in the abandoned house toward which the two hapless female hikers had been journeying, I said to myself, "Oh, here we go. All the evil of the movie will be tacitly ascribed to 'drugs.'" In fact, I actually turned the movie off at that point. But then, reflecting that I may have been rash, I continued to watch, after which I was relieved to find that the term "drugs" was never even mentioned in the film (although there was a post-it note in the money bag which made it clear that the booty therein came from a dirty evil rotten (and bad) drug deal. As for "Don't Say Its Name," it supposedly had to do with a Native American curse, but I flicked it off in less than 25 minutes when one of the apparent stars started ranting about the opioid crisis, in such a way, of course, as to imply that it was caused by dirty evil "drugs" rather than by a dirty evil Drug War -- a war that outlawed all safer means of self-transcendence which had been legal since caveman days.

For more on "drugs" in the movies, one could do worse than click on the following:

America's Obsession with Fascist Drug War Movies: In "Running with the Devil," Natalie Reyes shoots an unarmed suspect while she herself is smoking a drug that kills half a million Americans a year.




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Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

In "How to Change Your Mind," Michael Pollan says psychedelic legalization would endanger young people. What? Prohibition forces users to decide for themselves which mushrooms are toxic, or to risk buying contaminated product. And that's safe, Michael?
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
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.
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.
Doc to Franklin: "I'm sorry, Ben, but I see no benefits of opium use under my microscope. The idea that you are living a fulfilled life is clearly a mistake on your part. If you want to be scientific, stop using opium and be scientifically depressed like the rest of us."
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
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!
If there were no other problem with antidepressants, they would be wrong for the simple reason that they make a user dependent for life -- not as a bug (as in drugs like opium) but rather as a feature: that's how they "work," by being administered daily for a lifetime.
The drug war is a big scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
More Tweets






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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, Enough Drug War Propaganda Movies Already: review of the movie Du Zhan, aka Drug War, published on February 20, 2021 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)