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Glenn Close but no cigar by the Drug War Philospher at AbolishTheDEA.com
Glenn Close but no cigar
Four Good Days full of drug war propaganda
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 25, 2020
hame on Glenn Close for starring in the Drug War propaganda movie "Four Good Days," especially at a time when Donald Trump is threatening to use the death penalty to kill minorities who dare to use and sell the plant medicines of mother nature. For shame!
Every horror that Glenn Close's character blames on heroin is actually caused by the Drug War itself:
The lack of a safe supply of the drug
The contamination of product
The lack of objective info about all drugs
The lack of non-addictive alternatives from the rain forest
The expense of a habit
Let's examine some of the movies illogical assumptions one at a time by considering a variety of drug-war-biased sound bites of which the movie is so full:
Deb to daughter Molly: "The deal was, you wouldn't come back until you were clean."
Clean? The mother's use of the word "clean" here exposes the puritan Christian Science metaphysics that the Drug War presupposes. Psychiatry has addicted me personally to Effexor, but no one has told me that I'm dirty for using it, and it has a relapse rate every bit as high as heroin! Apparently, I'm not "dirty" as long as I settle for being hooked on the drugs that enrich pharmaceutical companies.
High school student to Molly: "I would have never allowed myself to fall that far."
Cruel but true. The fact is that the vast majority of kids do not fall as Molly did, even when the Drug War does all it can to confuse them with propaganda instead of straightforward objective accounts of drug effects. Molly's irrelevant response to this challenge is simply to tearfully reiterate how hard she (Molly) has struggled and how continuously she (Molly) has resolved to go straight, but to no avail. Her goal seems to be to imply that there are devil drugs out there that will snag anyone, but smarter kids know that substances are only substances and that the terms "good" and "bad" only apply to how they are used, for what reasons, and in what doses, etc. To think otherwise is to call on government to wage a bloody war on drugs to protect fools like Molly from herself, a Drug War that ironically creates the very incentives that cause drug sellers to peddle addictive meds in the first place.
Deb after seeing teenage drug dealer: "That guy should be shot."
Great. Thanks for that, Glenn. That's all we need to hear from a cinematic representative of middle America, now that we have a president who is all-too-eager to take your suggestion literally and start murdering Americans, mainly minorities at that - and why? - for merely meeting the needs of the market that the Drug War itself has created. Unless we suppose that the profit motive will someday disappear from human hearts and that human beings will renounce their desire for spiritual transcendence, a "war on drugs" can only bring about endless killing, first on inner city streets and then on the public scaffolds.
The answer is clear, Glenn: remove the profit motive by ending the drug laws that create it. Then turn the Drug Enforcement Agency into the Drug Education Agency, an organization tasked with objectively informing the public of the statistically verifiable dangers (yes, and benefits) of every psychoactive substance on earth: from Big Pharma antidepressants to cocaine, from alcohol to cigarettes.
Meanwhile, if someone needs to be shot, how about shooting those who create legislation that 1) violates natural law, 2) keeps godsend medicines from the depressed, 3) turns inner cities into shooting galleries, 4) locks up 10s of thousands of minorities, thus stealing elections for conservatives, 5) justifies Drug War colonialism, 6) prevents Earthlings from accessing the plants that grow at their very feet, and 7) makes drug-hating Christian Science the state religion when it comes to psychological healing. I'd rather not shoot anybody, of course, but if you think we have to, let's get our priorities right first when it comes to targeting.
Mother Deb, in reference to her detoxing daughter: "She's in hell right now."
Too true, Deb, but did you ever stop to ask WHY she's in hell? She's in hell because the drug-war has outlawed all the non-addictive substances (and/or the potentially addictive substances that could be easily used non-addictively) that might otherwise be used during the withdrawal process to ease withdrawal symptoms, and/or give the patient the psychological insight to better tolerate them. For even the detox centers are in the thrall of the Drug War, throwing addicts on cots and forcing them to go cold turkey when there are hundreds of psychoactive godsends that we're not even allowed to study, let alone use, medicines that can change attitudes and give addicts a new start in life.
Deb to Molly: [There's your] boyfriend Eric. Outside that flophouse.
Flophouse? Deb's referring to the bombed-out building in which Molly used to "shoot up," of course, but then what is the detox center but a flophouse, with meals included? The difference is that the rent is much higher, but otherwise they just flop you down on a cot and let you suffer, without ministering to you with any of the thousands of psychoactive balms of the rain forest, many of which, if used with reverence, can temper the mind of the addict to allow them to envision new realities and thus to make the desired changes in their life -- all without going through the hell that the Christian Science Drug Warrior insists that they must suffer.
Detox Doctor Ortiz: "Heroin has a 97% relapse rate."
What Doctor Ortiz fails to point out is that antidepressants like Effexor have identical relapse rates. In fact, psychiatrist-author Julie Holland tells us that many SSRIs are harder to kick than heroin. Why? Because modern antidepressants muck about with one's brain chemistry, which takes a long time (if ever) to resume a normal baseline after the discontinuation of continuously used SSRIs.
Speaking of the good Doctor, it's rather amusing to see him puffed up with professionalism in his white coat and carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, obviously in the prime of his professional life, and yet for all these customary bells and whistles, his job seems to consist merely of injecting Naltrexone and nodding gravely or cheerfully, as circumstances warrant. If appearances weren't everything in such treatments, a cost-sensitive CEO would instantly replace him with an LPN, or better yet an industrial robot decked out in the customary white garb of an officious rehab do-gooder.
Dr. Ortiz has not one single weapon in his pharmacological arsenal, not one (though thousands of rain forest meds are practically crying out to be assayed for such therapeutic purposes), except for Naltrexone, which, however, for him must seem a literal godsend, since it keeps a person from "getting high," which is the absolute no-no in Drug Warrior parlance, even though one person's "getting high" (off of, say, a non-addictive substance such as the psilocybin mushroom) can be another person's "spiritual transcendence." And so the rehab "expert" not only ignores the user's very reason for drug use -- self-transcendence -- but works to ensure that the patient never experiences that self-transcendence again in their life -- for that would constitute a relapse, don't you know. So full speed ahead until the user acknowledges their weakness vis-a-vis the modern boogieman of "drugs" and learns to console themselves for their unfulfilled ambitions in life by prayerfully passing on their sorrows to a thinly disguised Christian God known as "a higher power."
Worst of all, the heroin habitue (sorry, addict) in this movie is constantly lighting up a cigarette containing tobacco -- about the worst drug on the planet -- and the clueless mother sees absolutely no irony in that fact. As long as the drug being consumed supports capitalism, Glenn Close's usually apoplectic character is as quiet as a mouse. It's only when she sees someone attempting to seek transcendence without the use of a board-certified doctor that her character's hackles start to rise. The mother herself freely rushes to the refrigerator for a stiff peg whenever she becomes overwhelmed with her addict daughter's erratic behavior, blissfully ignorant of her own hypocrisy in so doing.
One can only conclude that the mother's problem is not so much with the daughter's addiction as it is with her failure to conform to the usual social norms of the coffee-swilling, cigarette-smoking, alcohol-swigging Drug Warrior.
Remember when the vindictive and hypocritical Glenn Close character murmurs that the teenage dealer "should be shot"? Well, in her defense, the apparent "scumbag" that she was referring to was white. In the 2021 movie "The Runner," another piece of drug-war agitprop, a white detective investigating a drug ring refers to a black teenager -- black TEENAGER, mind -- as, and I quote, "a scumbag, not worth another thought." And this detective was the hero of the film, along with the white teenager Aidan, of course, whom he literally slapped around and forced to "go undercover," after first denying him his right to a lawyer, reminding the badgered youth that "Guilty people want lawyers."
This kind of anti-American and racist dialogue should make movie viewers gag on their popcorn, but you'll have to search long and hard to find a movie critic who finds this plot revolting (and don't hold your breath waiting for Common Sense to flag the fascist tendencies of this film-- their job, after all, is to flag the mere mention of the boogieman called "drugs," not to complain about the fact that America's obsession on that subject has steered the ship of state toward hardcore fascism). It's not like the kids are suspected of dealing in nuclear weapons -- rather they are suspected of selling plant medicine that has been used wisely by other cultures for millennia, the prohibition of which has created drug cartels and inner-city gangs out of whole cloth, while causing civil wars in Mexico and empowering a self-proclaimed Drug War Hitler in the Philippines.
And what's this nonsense about dehumanizing a mere teenager as a "waste"? Does Detective Wall not remember his own youth? I'm not the only 64-year-old who sees his teenage self as an entirely different person, given what I've learned the hard way over the last four-plus decades of my life. The last thing we need is for drug-war zealots to judge us once and for all based on one childhood exploit. And yet the racist detective openly announces his desire to lock the black "waste" up for 20 years. He doesn't get his way, incidentally, but that was only because his SWAT team accidentally killed the kid -- assuming it's possible to "accidentally" kill a teenager by riddling his chest with bullets from every possible direction -- as part of a criminally irresponsible raid on a bunch of unarmed teenagers.
Author's Follow-up: August 6, 2022
In his various interviews, Noam Chomsky repeatedly talks about how American politics is designed by the rich elite to turn the mainstream middle class against the less fortunate -- to thereby keep the bourgeois class busy, as it were, with their self-righteous recriminations so that they'll never have the time or the unity to make a sustained case for better education or adequate housing or adequate healthcare etc. What he might have added is that the elites are able to divide and conquer America like this largely because of the Drug War. For let's face it, it's an age in which you can no longer get away with demeaning another race, another ethnic group, or another religion. And where does all that pent-up prejudice go? Not to worry, because our Drug War gives us the answer: thanks to the war on drugs, Americans are given carte blanche to out-Nazi the Nazis when it comes to demonizing "drug users" and "drug dealers," those fellow Americans whom we are permitted -- and even encouraged -- to call scumbags and filth, words once reserved for the Jews and homosexuals in the Third Reich. And why are we given this freedom of slander and libel? Because these fellow Americans are guilty of a crime that did not even exist 150 years ago: the crime of using and selling medicines of which demagogue politicians disapprove -- medicines that they falsely claim have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, at any time.
That's why Glenn Close seems like an American role model these days when she looks at a teenage dealer in "Four Good Days" and mutters, "He should be shot!"
Of course, if we're gonna shoot anyone, we should shoot those who created the Drug War to tear America apart by demonizing amoral substances.
Barring this, then we may as well give Glenn's character a swastika epaulet and a German accent, under the theory that we simply cannot be mean ENOUGH toward the Christian Science heretics that we call "drug dealers."
Author's Follow-up: August 20, 2022
Thinking more about Glenn Close's desire to shoot the teenage drug dealer. It never occurs to her that the answer is teaching and education, not demonization. When the poor are taught the true facts about all substances without hypocrisy (as opposed to being taught to fear them, which is the written policy of the Office of Nation Drug Control Policy as conceived by Joe Biden) and when mother nature is free again, like it always was until 1914 America, then the whole social landscape would change as we begin to think logically about substances rather than ideology. The point here is that the current system is set up to scapegoat the young and vulnerable for any drug-related issues -- and it succeeds like a charm, as Glenn Close is the American Everywoman when it comes to the middle class who takes out her anger, not on the powers that be who incarcerate millions of minorities and now call for their execution (the powers that be who withhold godsend morphine from dying kids and have lied about godsend medicines for the depressed for almost 100 years now) but rather on the poor, the uneducated, and the young.
The demagogue Drug Warriors are laughing all the way to the bank. But I suppose we Americans should be happy. At least we're not overseas where presidents like Reagan have done all they could to murder those who were seeking social justice. Capitalism uber alles, don't you know?
Divide and conquer. For the slogan of the moneyed Drug Warrior is: "Keep their eyes OFF the prize."
What Have We Learned?
September 20, 2024
I learned that...
(mouse over responses to check your answer)
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.
The media have done all they can to support the 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.
They also support the drug war by ignoring it. Just read any article on inner-city shootings or on the extraordinary violence that is forever breaking out in South America. It's all related to the fact that America, in its arrogance, taught the world to blame plant medicines for social problems. And there was no excuse. Liquor prohibition had already created the American Mafia: and yet the media sees no connection between the drug war and the violence judging by their news coverage.
They also have a field day superstitiously blaming drugs. It used to be PCP, ICE, oxy, crack, and now it's fentanyl... Movies are now personifying these drugs in the forms of Crack Raccoons and Meth Gators. America has become so superstitious and childish about drugs that it's sad -- and the media can take much of the blame.
Many of my essays are about and/or directed to specific individuals, some well-known, others not so well known, and some flat-out nobodies like myself. Here is a growing list of names of people with links to my essays that in some way concern them.
For those who want to understand what's going on with the drug war from a philosophical point of view, I recommend chapter six of "Eugenics and Other Evils" by GK Chesterton.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."
My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
Oregon's drug policy is incoherent and cruel. The rich and healthy spend $4,000 a week on psilocybin. The poor and chemically dependent are thrown in jail, unless they're on SSRIs, in which case they're congratulated for "taking their meds."
The idea that "drugs" have no medical benefits is not science, it is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. It is based on the idea that benefits must be molecularly demonstratable and not created from mere knock-on psychological effects of drug use, time-honored tho' they be.
The addiction gene should be called the prohibition gene: it renders one vulnerable to prohibition lies and limitations: like the lack of safe supply, the lack of choices, and the lack of information. We should pathologize the prohibitionists, not their victims.
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
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, Glenn Close but no cigar: Four Good Days full of drug war propaganda, published on February 25, 2020 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)
hame on Glenn Close for starring in the Drug War propaganda movie "Four Good Days," especially at a time when Donald Trump is threatening to use the death penalty to kill minorities who dare to use and sell the plant medicines of mother nature. For shame!
You have been reading an article entitled, Glenn Close but no cigar: Four Good Days full of drug war propaganda, published on February 25, 2020 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)