On Sunday, October 8, 2006, after a screening of the motion picture, A Scanner Darkly, at the University of Maryland in College Park, I spoke to the audience about the moral and political implications of the story. I was accompanied by Micah Daigle, Field Director, Students for Sensible Drug Policy national office. This event was sponsored by the University's Student Entertainment Events office and the Students for Sensible Drug Policy University of Maryland chapter.
The plot is complex and hard to follow, but the characterizations and acting are excellent, and there are many funny scenes with Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Rory Cochrane The dramatic acting by Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder is suspenseful and gripping.
The movie is set in the near future in Orange County, CA, then in grip of a terrible new drug abuse epidemic. The anti-drug police have more pervasive surveillance tools and resources than our current law enforcement agencies, with the ready ability to monitor anybody anywhere. There is such an enormous number of undercover agents who need to operate under extremely tight security that their actual identities are unknown to one another.
The new drug causes brain damage manifested by random hallucinations and paranoia, yet its users become addicted to some effect of the drug, and need to find it to use it. The drug is especially insidious in that it is believed to create a sort of split personality so that a person may be living to two parallel existences. The drug is reputedly deadly, although no deaths from its use are depicted, that I recall. The drug is also pervasive and we find that all of the central characters are addicted to it. The mental illness the drug engenders is portrayed throughout the movie. There is a uniquely effective, widely advertised treatment available that requires living in a secure facility.
As the movie progresses, the integrity of the drug enforcement agency and the treatment business come into question.
The movie is an adaptation of a 1977 novel by Philip K. Dick, one of the leading authors of our time, who is best known as a science fiction writer. His literary executors, the Philip K. Dick Trust, have this to say about the movie.
This essay by Lawrence Sutin (a professor at Hamline University, St. Paul, MN) helps explain Dick's vision and purpose.
My comments:
George Orwell's novel 1984, also a dark vision of the future, helped to define the late 20th century vision of a police state using the model of World War II, the state security surveillance systems of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and its occupied territories, and the state propaganda systems developed and used by all the major powers.
A Scanner Darkly, the movie, is influenced by the domestic police practices in the U.S. of the last two decades; by the widespread availability -- if not widespread use -- of cocaine, heroin, club drugs, prescribed psychoactive medications, and methamphetamine; and the late 20th century social concept of a drug epidemic.
In the limited time available to me, I argued that the movie's depiction of the state's failure to control drug misuse and the drug trade by means of an intense prohibition regime reflects a contemporary reality. In dialogue with the audience I argued that the continuation of the drug problem, i.e, our systematic failure to really address it, continues the growth and power of the law enforcement industry, and serves to advance political careers, and certain social agendas.
I argued that combating the prohibition system was a moral imperative that ranked with the importance of the student anti-Vietnam war movement.
I argued that students had a right to demand that the university be truthful in characterizing the health threats students face and demand that university disciplinary policies be based on facts not propaganda. I argued that it was unacceptably disrespectful to students as persons with full legal responsibility for their conduct to promulgate disciplinary policies that reflected falsehoods and prejudice, such as punishing marijuana use more harshly than alcohol use.
My conclusion is that the students had a duty and a right to get active on campus around drug policy issues.
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