Brad Pitt: The U.S. 'War On Drugs' Is A 'Charade'
Brad Pitt headed to WeHo in support of a documentary he produced and took a swipe at the decades-old war on drugs. Pitt apparently just said 'yes' back in the day, but said his days dabbling in illegal substances have long gone. Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki bowed his latest The House I Live In and stopped in a West Hollywood theater for a Q&A with his super-star producer who flew in from Europe for a chat.
"My drug days have long since passed," Pitt told THR as reported by The Guardian. "But I could probably land in any American city and within 24 hours find whatever you want. But we still support this charade called the drug war. We spent a trillion dollars over 40 years and a lot of people have lost their lives over it."
Pitt felt compelled to get involved with the project which won a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January. He said that the "subject has bugged me for a long time. It's a backward strategy. It makes no sense and we keep going on the path like we're winning, when it perpetuates more drugs being used."
Jarecki added his two cents and jokingly called Pitt "a drug addict," and likened the U.S. government's anti-drug crusade to Prohibition.
"After prohibition, we regrouped and said it was a bad idea what we're doing. Now we have a system where alcohol is illegal for children; the government profits off it; grownups can use it responsibly, which means if I go out in my car and kill some one it's manslaughter. But if I've been drinking, it's an aggravating prosecutorial factor. So why is it that drugs – which are less damaging to public health than alcohol – why is it we treat them more severely?"
[Source: The Guardian]
Subscribe to the new Movieline on YouTube
Comments
How can any responsible parent not desire a saner drug policy, and one that’s based on facts rather than reefer madness? Prohibition guarantees that many illegal drugs are far easier for our children to procure than even alcohol or nicotine. That's because, even though these are both very dangerous and addictive drugs, they are at least sold in properly controlled and regulated environments.
Under our present regime, certain plants/concoctions/drugs are sold only by criminals and terrorists; the huge black-market profits are used to threaten innocent civilians, bribe law enforcement officials, and buy support from unconscionable politicians; the availability and usage rates tend to go up, not down, and our prisons have become filled to capacity with easily replaced vendors and smugglers —this list of dangerous and negative consequences is actually endless. To continue prohibition is ludicrous, and those of us who can't see that by now, must be either severely and mentally challenged or using something far stronger than any of us have even heard of.
Why on earth should we be willing to whack ourselves with ever-bigger and more-repressive prohibition hammers, while drug use and availability keep going up, not down, and while we all plunge deeper into Loserville?
Prohibition is the most destructive, dysfunctional, dishonest and racist social policy since Slavery. Prohibition is a holocaust in slow motion. We MUST end it NOW!
I would like to thank you for the efforts you have put in writing this site. I’m hoping the same high-grade blog post from you in the upcoming also. In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me to get my own web site now. Really the blogging is spreading its wings quickly. Your write up is a great example of it.