The "Reefer Madness" DEA Scare Film of hard drugs.

Rating: 3/10 (20 December 2008)

I'm sorry, I simply must chime in here. This movie is garbage as far as good junkie movies go. I'm surprised people even lump it in with good and realistic movies like Trainspotting.
This entire movie, to me, reeked of the reefer madness of hard drugs. Light on the facts, heavy on the fear and annoying, scary sound effects.
The scare tactics used throughout the entire film are pretty obvious and began to wear on me. There was truly nothing notable to me about this film except the constant, recurring feeling that the writer had never touched a hard drug in his life. If he had, then he was going to make sure to blow everything as far out of proportion as possible.
I suppose no one will even CONSIDER any sort of psychoactive substance if this is what they do to you. Luckily this is a badly-done dramatization and anyone with eyes and a brain can see that it's rubbish. Maybe he's not going for realism and people are able to give it a pass for its pure artistic value.
It's the little things. Take the "main" male lead, for example. Every time he shoots up heroin his pupils blow out. Anyone with the most BASIC understanding of drugs knows that the #1 sign of the presence of an opiate is PIN-POINTED pupils. Amphetamines blow out pupils, heroin and opiates cause them to become near pin-points. Nitpicking? On something so basic, maybe not so much. Since they thought it was such a cool feature that they decided to show it EVERY time he got high, then perhaps they should have done the first iota of research and represented the drug properly.
It's like they took some of the DEA's most promising writers and shoved them in a room and said "Go in and write a movie that will scare the kids sh*t-less against 'drugs' in general, don't worry about the facts."
A couple of things:
Permanent amphetamine psychosis? Doesn't really happen...it almost *always* clears up after cessation of use. So the lady going in for electroshock? Pure BS.
Being arrested for seeking help at a hospital? Completely ridiculous, and it even sends a DANGEROUS message to kids who may be in trouble.
Uneducated kids have DIED because they were afraid they would be arrested at the ER. It's called patient/doctor confidentiality! Misinformation from ridiculous D.A.R.E. FEAR FILMS like this one are the reason some are reluctant to seek treatment. What about the problems caused by the LAW ENFORCEMENT end of the drug problem?
The final scene with it's absolutely annoying camera angles and near-snuff-level scenes of people being electrocuted and DYING in jail was enough to make me leave the room. Enough is enough. This movie is awful
This is nowhere NEAR a good representation of the lifestyle of a junkie. The movie is stuck so far up its own rear when it comes to its message that it loses any potency.
The characters are not believable addicts they all bumble around completely depressed all the time and when they are high it is depicted as some manic, terrifying madness.
It's as if the person who wrote it had absolutely no clue what the substances actually did to people, so he decided to act as though they were injecting gasoline instead...
It makes some valid points, but overall it comes across as a scare-flick made by an anti-drug advocate with an agenda. Sorry if you're one of the many fans of this movie. I saw it once when I was in high school, and now I've seen it again, 7 years later. Two thumbs down, what a piece of trash.