RAGING AGAINST THE WAR ON DRUGS

Nelson Activist Places Pro-Marijuana Argument In A Mythic Context

The Naked Queen

EDMONTON - It's pretty clear that if Canada were a European country,
marijuana use would be legal, but we live next to the United States,
which has been waging an indiscriminate war on drugs for decades.

Nelson, B.C., filmmaker Daryl Verville is more than indignant about
the American government's inflexible attitude to cannabis, in
particular; he's overwrought. But rather than organizing an insurgency
against the U.S. administration, he has made a very thorough, even
somewhat balanced documentary attacking the punitive, costly policy
against marijuana use of any kind, medicinal or otherwise.

Verville tries to elevate the debate by placing the pro-marijuana
argument in a mythic context, pointing out the weed's long history of
medicinal and even metaphysical associations going back to the ancient
cultures of India and the Middle East. This part of the documentary is
solidly researched and untendentious. The chronological record of
marijuana's cultural influences is interwoven into two other narrative
constructs that drive home the politics of his position.

Verville incorporates dramatization through the characters of Carl
Jung, Beethoven and Gandhi. The script for the actors playing Jung and
Gandhi is forceful and articulate, reinforcing the filmmaker's basic
point that the demonization of cannabis has been an exercise in
myth-making, in the most pejorative sense of the word.

The pothead who appears, claiming he's reached a transcendental
understanding of Beethoven's stand against tyranny through
drug-induced dreams, will not impress anyone who already believes
pot-smokers live in a mental haze because of their habit. Dope is not
the conduit to brilliant insight for most users.

The most conventional documentary aspect of Verville's mission is very
convincing. Psychologist Bruce Alexander is impressive in making the
case that marijuana is hardly as harmful as anti-pot zealots make it
out to be, and Hilary Black, founder of the B.C. Compassion Club,
which provides people with medicinal marijuana, is hard to fault in
her perspective on the drug's benefits.

Activist Marc Emery gets his say, and much is made of the U.S. attempt
to extradite him for trafficking in cannabis seeds. There's nothing
addle-headed about Emery's advocacy for legalized pot, and Canadian
Senator Larry Campbell is a fine spokesman in defence of Canadian
sovereignty and a critic of American excess.

For Verville, the issue isn't just marijuana's virtues, though. He
uses the misguided, wasteful war on the drug to emphasize the danger
of ultra-conservative power that deprives reasonable people of
freedoms of all kinds. When he likens American drug policy to its
deceit-ridden invasion of Iraq and even Nazism, you might think his
laissez-faire worldview is tinged with a trace of paranoia, even if
you're sympathetic to his argument otherwise.

Here's what he's said about the larger implication of the drug war.

"The propaganda that caused people to believe that Germans were a
master race and Jews were an inferior race and needed to be
exterminated has an exact parallel in the war on marijuana. You create
false evils, create fear and hatred for a certain class of people and
proceed to inflict horrific punishment on the targets of your lies.
All the while seizing totalitarian power for yourself and your cronies
based on the need for people to abandon their normal concepts of right
and wrong and leave those decisions entirely to the propagandists."

You certainly don't have to buy this extreme comparison to appreciate
what The Naked Queen accomplishes. If you're interested in an
informative appeal for sensible rules on how marijuana should be
managed in a society that sanctions alcohol consumption as though it
were less risky than pot use, then you'll enjoy this documentary.