Drug War/Drug Testing in Pop Culture Part 2: Sly Cooper: Band of Thieves

Remember the PS2 game "Sly Cooper"?

I not only remember it, I still play it.  In particular, the best game IMO, which was the second one "Sly Cooper: Band of Thieves".  It was amazing fun, with an interesting storyline, fun story-based challenges, and best of all, the optional challenge of finding 30 "clue" bottles in every overall open-ended chapter environment.  Plus you could just wander around and pick the pockets of the various guards if you wanted and build up some loot to use later--or just because you want to go around playing a game where you run around on your own terms and pick pockets as you please with no particular goal, whatever you like.

But there was one thing about it that both irks me and makes me laugh, and that is the Drug War element of the plot.  It's clear that the game-producers really wanted to have some kind of gritty drug-trade-based storyline but couldn't do it directly because, despite the fact that it's a game about a master thief and his thieving buddies who come in constant contact with criminal villainous types, it's-also a cartoony and light-hearted game directed at children.  Enter "spice".

You see, one constantly recurring theme in the plot was this plant-based substance known as "spice", that is clearly a euphemism for drugs.  Presumably some kind of really hard drug, since at some point they directly refer to this plant as causing "insane violent rages" in those who use it, and the only people who still believe that about marijuana are the chowder-heads who still think "Reefer Madness" was fair and accurate.  I swear, every time any character uttered this coy euphemism--with the comical levels of melodramatic doom usually reserved for vaudeville--my late brother and I would fall about laughing our guts out.  (Yes, I know that there is supposed to be some kind of drug called "spice" now, but I think this pre-dated it, or at least pre-dated widespread awareness of it, otherwise why would they use the word as a euphemism to make it acceptable for children?)

And seriously, who ever took a drug where the only result was "insane violent rage"?  Even alcohol which is legal and, depending on the circumstances and user, can make a person violent, is not imbibed strictly for its violence-inducing properties.  Any "insane violent rages" induced by any drug are a side-effect, and I've never heard of a drug where it was an inevitability or else you wouldn't have to pretend to need to drug test to find people who were using--they'd all already be in jail for assault!  I rather suspect that the same thing is at work here that is at work at all "anti-drug" messages aimed at children--to take one negative result of a particular kind of drug use, extrapolate from that to all users, and present this to the children as the single and solitary result of taking any drug--and, by extension, the single and solitary reason anyone takes drugs.  Because if you told them the real reason people end up trying drugs INCLUDING alcohol (which is the "high"), you might intrigue them enough to want to try it.

And since you're presenting all illicit drugs in this category and in this light, at some point the kids will try marijuana, they will know the older generation has lied through their teeth about it, and assume at that point that maybe cocaine or heroine or some harder drug is equally harmless.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy this game and play it every year or so.  (Ironically enough, its particularly fun when you're buzzed on some rum or vodka--you can just pick pockets for hours and if you get caught, you don't care, you're running and laughing, and I can only imagine how it might be to play it after a puff of MJ!)  But every time I play it I can't help but look forward to the day when Drug War references like this will be looked at as a quaint and curious relic of one of the mistakes of the older generations, the way old Prohibition I propaganda is regarded today.

That will be sweet.  Let's make it happen, people!

Drug War/Drug Testing in Popular Culture Part 1: The Ghostbusters Game

Let me tell you something about me.  I love The Ghostbusters.  I love Ghostbusters big time.  Ray is my favorite, and Egon is probably next--a big factor of that is probably because Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis created it, and also because Dan Akroyd is hot, shut up.  And I have played the game through several times and am finally trying for the "Are You A God" achievement for the first time--while Bioshock Infinite sits half-played on my shelf.  I just can't get sick of anything Ghostbusters.  Believe me, I've tried.

Which is why one line in the Civil War Exhibit section of the Museum level is like nails on a chalkboard down my spine every time I hear it.  If you've played it, you probably know what I'm talking about.  It's that line, shouted by Winston while you and the Ghostbusters bust an ongoing ghostly Civil War battle, that goes, "It couldn't have been the American Revolutionary War, could it?  Or the War of Roses.  Even the War on Drugs!  It had to be THIS one!"

HA HA HA HA HA HA...oh, no wait.  That's not funny.  At least, it isn't if you're aware of the fact that the War on Drugs is effectively the most recent continuation of the values of the South in the Civil War, and possibly the most successful attempt to return to those halcyon days of enslavement of black people for white profit.  And to put those words into the mouth of Winston, a black man living in New York City, where blacks and latinos make up about 45% of the city's drug users but represent over 80% of drug incarcerations due to various racist applications of Drug War policies such as the recently neutralized (here's hoping) "Stop and Frisk" laws, where minority schoolchildren are funneled into the prison system in the "School to Prison pipeline" in an effort to ensure that as many minorities as possible will enter adulthood with criminal records that will guarantee their futures as career prisoners, where those prisoners are then put in prison, often private for-profit prisons wherein prisoner labor is used for commercial profit...well, words simply don't exist to sufficiently express my disgust.

The War on Drugs is an enabling policy of modern day slavery on modern day plantations.  It is a return to the days when predominantly black labor is used to enrich predominantly white people--the fact that this time, there are a few white faces in the sea of human livestock means nothing, as the rich white Drug War supporters are more than happy to throw a few of their own on the grenade if they can get rich,but the primary target is minorities, because it's easier to get people to ignore the pain of people who look different from the majority, especially if you can use misinformation about drugs and tie it to misinformation about minorities to convince that majority that "those people" are just suffering their "just deserts" for being so evil.  The Drug War is a thinly veiled modern-day extension of the institution of slavery from the Civil War, and to have a black character, suggest that this newer institution, wherein people who exist today are currently suffering, is preferable to the Civil War and nineteenth century southern slavery which, as terrible and unconscionable and utterly wrong as it was, is over--and to have him express this preference in such a way that it is suggested that the two are mutually exclusive, unconnected to one another, and that the former is not the continuation of the latter--well, that is the kind of thing a privileged and sheltered white idiot would say.  Or a privileged and sheltered token black person.  In either case, someone who is entirely ignorant of the facts.  Or a complete traitor who doesn't care because their own private gravy train is set.  It's exactly the kind of dumbshit thing I would have said many years ago before I stopped assuming I knew what was going on and actually bothered to shut up and listen and learn.  I'm not proud of that, but I did learn, and a lot of other people need to do likewise in this country.  Believe me, it's not as hard as they say it is to admit you were wrong, America!  Especially when you can do something to fix your mistakes!

Please, Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, please don't make me think that Winston is not just a Token Black Guy but a conservative Republican Token Black Guy toboot--a total sellout and a tool.  And please don't make me think that, failing that, Winston is somehow ignorant of how the majority of the toll of the failed Drug War has fallen on minorities, especially black Americans, and how it is nothing more than a front for racist economic and social policies?  You spent so much time developing your three white guys to the point where a single episode of The Real Ghostbusters told me more about WHO Winston was as a person than two whole Ghostbusters movies, and now you're starting to give him a bit more development--even making him an educated man rather than the "help"!--and you have to ruin it by making him say something boneheaded and ignorant--or dare I say it, reeking of white privilege--like this?

Pretty please with sugar on top?

What the movie "Compliance" tells us about drug testing

Have you seen this “Compliance” movie yet? It’s based on a true story about some creep who would call up various low-wage workplaces, mostly fast-food, pretending to be a cop and got managers (and in this case, the manager’s fiancé) to strip-search female employees, starting off with a claim that a customer was accusing said employee of theft (that she reached into the customer’s purse on the counter and stole money out of it) then claiming that in reality they were “under investigation” regarding “drug crimes”, and that they were simply too busy at that particular employee’s apartment searching for drugs to come and take her into custody and search her themselves. It’s an interesting insight into the mentality of the common person to bend to the commands of authority, almost a live-in-the-wild confirmation of the findings of the Milgram experiment.


I’ve heard people express surprise that anyone could fall for such a ruse or that this could even be real. What surprises me, though, is that this should surprise anyone at all. This is a major flaw in human psychology, as evidenced by Milgram, but it’s also an inevitable result of our failed Drug War and in particular an inevitable result of drug testing culture.


Now be honest, we begin our employment relationship with an employer insult to our integrity and an outright statement of distrust—a direct accusation, in fact an a priori conviction, of criminal activity, of committing a drug crime. Apropos of nothing, with zero cause to suspect you of such behavior, they assume before the fact that you are a drug user and they convict you without evidence or a trial. The employer then insists that you must exonerate yourself of these a priori criminal convictions before they will hire you—not that it will afford you an ounce of trust or respect, of course. And the biggest insult is that to exonerate ourselves, they demand we submit to a highly unreliable and incredibly privacy-invading search and seizure of highly intimate bodily fluids and trust them—devoid of any legal recourse on our part and devoid of any government oversight or regulation of the testing company-- effectively expecting us to afford them a gargantuan amount of trust in response to their overt declaration of distrust toward us. Even as they distrust and disrespect us and tell us so to our faces by asking for a drug test without suspicion, they expect us to trust them to not use our specimen for anything other than the stated purpose and not to, say, screen us for protected conditions like diabetes, pregnancy, or heart problems they don't want on their insurance. And remember, they expect us to trust them absolutely to behave properly even as they receive zero oversight from the law, have zero accountability for their actions regarding drug testing, and can do as they please.


What I'm saying is that drug testing culture has created an automatic master/slave relationship between employer and employee. The employer begins the relationship by demanding a drug test without cause—essentially telling the potential hire that the company is worthy of utmost trust and respect and that the employee is worthy only of distrust, disrespect, and abject contempt, and is little more than a criminal by default until they “prove” themselves innocent of any crime.


This becomes even worse when the company in question commits random drug testing on their employees, because that takes the initial pre-employment drug testing insult and extends it to the entire duration of employment. In that case, you are now perpetually a criminal in the eyes of your employer, deserving of neither trust nor respect, and you must submit your intimate sample to them and trust them with that sample infinitely more than they trust you. And moreover, you will NEVER, as long as you work there, be able to exonerate yourself on any level. No matter how many times you submissively urinate for them, you will always continue to be a convicted criminal subject to invasive search and seizure, you will always be untrustworthy and beneath your company's contempt while your company demands constant godlike trust and infinite surveillance over your body and life as the sole method to ensure that you are being “good”. You will never be exonerated, you will never be worth of trust or respect, you will always be a filthy criminal in the eyes of your employer as long as you work there. It's no wonder that random drug testing causes lower productivity rates. Even people who support drug testing or don't think about it one way or another know subconsciously that these things are true, and it's hard to want to work very hard for an employer who holds you in open contempt and believes your flesh is company property and not your own.


Which brings us to “Compliance” again. Finding a non-drug testing company in Ohio (where the film was set and the original incident occurred) has become like finding a needle in a haystack, and even if you're just saying “do you want fries with that” you're expected to piss on command for the “honor”. Even in companies that don't drug test, the pro-drug testing mentality and culture (and the witch-hunt mentality that goes hand-in-hand with it), there is always knowledge that your employer has that idea that you are probably a drug user, that your employer is being bombarded with drug testing industry propaganda without any challenging points of view to show what a load it is, that your employer is being told the lie that not drug testing means that their entire workforce is made entirely of drug users by definition, that your employer is looking at you cockeyed every day suspecting you of criminal activity because of that propaganda, that adversarial relationship with your employer and the fact that at any moment your company might give in to the evil and jump on the privacy-invading wagon.


So, given those facts, given the high likelihood that this girl was forced by that manager to piss in a cup before being hired, why is it surprising that that manager or any manager would force that employee to strip when ordered to do so by a voice on the phone claiming to have authority over them? And why is it surprising that that employee submitted to that treatment, after having already submitted to a practice that creates an undeniable subconscious understanding that even what you have between your legs is not your own but is corporate property to be searched at the corporation's whim? Few people even know their rights anymore, either regarding the government or their employer. Far from being surprising, the was actually the inevitable result of the mentality of drug testing that has gripped this benighted country throughout the drug war.


Don't believe me? Well, notice that when the manager begins to doubt and ask some questions, what does the police impersonator say? Well, he tells her the “real” reason he's having her strip-search her employee isn't just some random claim of theft from an unidentified customer, it's because she's involved in DRUGS. And at that point, you see the manager's face harden and she no longer has any questions, any doubt, or any mercy or sympathy for her now-naked subordinate. This treatment no longer seems out-of-line or unreasonable—because before she hired this girl, without a single hint that this girl could be involved in drugs, she likely forced this girl to pull down her pants and provide her with an intimate sample from the inside of her body to “prove” she wasn't, so it sounds reasonable to her unreasoning drug-testing culture brain that, having a confirmed conviction by the word of an unverified police officer on the phone, that she should be asked to strip-search this “drug user”. The moment he brought up “we're investigating her for drugs”, she was his pawn and this girl became the clear enemy, deserving of neither dignity nor respect, and as for rights...well, it was well-established in both manager's and employee's minds upon the pre-employment drug test that the employee has no rights, especially where drugs are concerned.


Now think about that. Really consider that.


ALL HE HAD TO DO TO QUELL HER DOUBTS AND SILENCE HER QUESTIONS AND OBTAIN HER TOTAL OBEDIENCE IN EFFECTIVELY RAPING THIS GIRL WAS TO INVOKE THE DRUG BOOGEY-MAN!


That should make your blood run cold. If it doesn't, you are too far gone to see how far gone this country is, and you are part of the problem.