A Quote by Perri Peltz
There seems is predominantly a white person's drug addiction epidemic, so that's why you see white people in our film, Warning: This Drug May Kill You.
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How does the [New York] Times treat White pathology? They reported an epidemic of heroin addiction in the Philadelphia suburbs. which included emergency admissions and overdoses; these White people in the suburbs were doing heroin like it was going out of style. I counted the words: the article consisted of 200 words. "Heroin Epidemic" in the back section. Out here in California, the typical drug addict is a housewife or suburban White woman.
Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue.
I hope 'Warning: This Drug May Kill You' documentary helps to show the humanity of the people who are struggling with the brain disease of addiction because that is what this is - this isn't about bad people, this is about good people who became addiction oftentimes in the process of being prescribed medication for pain.
It is not enough to show that drug A is better than drug B on the average. One is invited to ask, 'For which people ("& why") is drug A better than drug B, and vice versa? If drug A cures 40% and drug B cures 60%, perhaps the right choice of drug for each person would result in 100% cures.'
The War on Drugs is a war on people, but particularly it's been a war on low-income people and a war on minorities. We know in the United States of America there is no difference in drug use between black, white and Latinos. But if you're Latino in the United States of America, you're about twice as likely to be arrested for drug use than if you're white. If you're black, you are about four times as likely to be arrested if you're African American than if you are white. This drug war has done so much to destroy, undermine, sabotage families, communities, neighborhoods, cities.
In the 1990s - the period of the greatest escalation of the drug war - nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least, if not more, prevalent in middle class white neighborhoods and college campuses as it is in the 'hood.
[T]he truth is that drug addicts have a disease. It only takes a short time in the streets to realize that out-of-control addiction is a medical problem, not a form of recreational or criminal behavior. And the more society treats drug addiction as a crime, the more money drug dealers will make "relieving" the suffering of the addicts.
We did decide that every addict in this film, Warning: This Drug May Kill You, would be someone who started out with a prescription for an opioid from a doctor. The story that hadn't been told is that the vast majority - somewhere around 80 percent - of current heroin users began with an addiction to prescription opioids. So as much as people might want to look at this and say, 'Oh this is really a heroin problem,' yes, it is a heroin problem, and no one is saying differently, but it starts more often than not with a prescription.
When you're a person of color in white America, you know white people. You know why you know white people? Because you can't enjoy any kind of entertainment if you are not able to humanize white people. If you watch a film and are like, "Oh, this has white people in it? Then I'm not interested," then you can't enjoy anything in America!
It seemed that the problem of Americans overdosing and dying from drug addiction was being described as bad people, particularly kids, who were abusing good drugs. But Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, and I were particularly interested in finding out the stories of people and families who had been ravaged by this disease of addiction and understanding what really was happening. What we found was that, and let's not make any mistake about it, this is an epidemic of addiction.
Here's the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it's put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don't call them a white film. I'm trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.
If there was any drug that was to symbolize the people that ate our heroes, it seems like bath salts was a good idea. It's also a drug that, I think, is still funny to a lot of people.
It seems that our politicians see the world in black and white, so why not our artists? Did Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' have to be in black and white? No. But is it fantastic that it was? To see New York like that? Yes!
Most of the drug CEOs I know, they're not themselves - they're what people want them to be. It's pretty obvious of the different drug executives. They're old white men, very buttoned up. They're appropriate, so to speak. I'm a little bit more irreverent, and I'm not going to change just because I have this job.
Blunt force didn't knock out the drug epidemic. 21 million Americans are addicted to drugs or alcohol. And half of all federal inmates are in for drug crimes.
It seems that people are tired of everyone looking the same on television. And this seems especially true for white people. Even white people are tired of watching the same white people. That's why we've been importing them from Australia.
