'Breaking the Taboo': The Worst Thing About Illegal Drugs is Not the Drugs Allan MacDonell - TakePart
go to original December 26, 2012

Breaking The Taboo - Film: Narrated by Oscar winning actor Morgan Freeman, "Breaking the Taboo" is produced by Sam Branson's indie Sundog Pictures and Brazilian co-production partner Spray Filmes and was directed by Cosmo Feilding Mellen and Fernando Grostein Andrade. Featuring interviews with several current or former presidents from around the world, such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, the film follows The Global Commission on Drug Policy on a mission to break the political taboo over the United States led War on Drugs and expose what it calls the biggest failure of global policy in the last 40 years. (breakingthetaboofilm)

Breaking the Taboo is a new documentary film that dares to suggest - make that insist - that global drug policy, as largely dictated by the United States, is exactly the wrong way to go about reducing the harm done by drug addiction to individuals and societies.

Released in Brazil in 2011 and adapted for the European and American market by producer Sam Branson’s Sundog Pictures, Breaking the Taboo explores the findings reached by the Global Commission on Drug Policy in 2011. The independent, international commission determined that drug liberalization is the best approach in dealing with drug policy. (Along with several former heads of state, Sam Branson’s father, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, is a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy.)

We wanted to talk to Branson to find out more. For most Americans, the War on Drugs is fought in the media. But for the millions of people incarcerated in the U.S. and the many thousands killed worldwide since President Richard Nixon militarized hostilities against people getting high in 1971, drug-war arrest statistics and death tolls are counted off in real-world prison yards and morgues.

Over the past four decades, a host of elected leaders and appointed drug czars have pressed for “zero tolerance” in a “crusade” to “just say no” to the consumption of illegal drugs. This campaign has been presented as an epic battle for the soul of America.

Drug supply and use within the U.S. has perhaps diminished since 1971 - it depends on whose accounting you trust - but the American appetite for illicit highs is still the primary driver of one of the world’s most robust and lethal clandestine economies. Every year America’s drug war drags on, more than 10,000 lives are lost - in Mexico alone.

“The war has created the situation,” explains Jorge Casteneda, Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003, speaking directly into Breaking the Taboo’s camera. “The situation did not create the war.”

Narrator Morgan Freeman - the embodiment of God in 2003’s Bruce Almighty - provides the voice of almighty reason as the film presents charged interviews and images from several continents to trace the history of the War on Drugs and testify to the ruinous, often fatal, mass disruptions caused by criminalizing a medical issue.

The inevitable conclusion of Breaking the Taboo is that, despite 40 years of concerted attack, the War on Drugs is no closer to victory than at its outset, amassing nothing more than a staggering casualty rate. Still, the government agencies waging this losing battle seem to be no closer to reviewing and changing their tactics.

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