Over-rated morality tale

Rating: 1/10 (25 August 2002)

The real descent into the quagmire is the last 30 minutes of this film, not the characters within the film. According to this film this is what you can expect from drug abuse: 1. Being force-fed in a public hospital (have these people heard of the IV drip?) and then ECT without any form of anaethesia (every bone in that woman's body would have shattered)- did they take her to a hospital in Eastern Europe?? 2. People with severe septicaemia will be denied hospital treatment and thrown into a cell on suspicion of being a drug addict until they require amputation. Watch and learn - it's fine to be a junkie as long as you don't get caught. 3. A man will be allowed to vomit into food being prepared in a government run correction facility. If you are bad, you eat vomit. OK? 4. A middle class chick will end up on the other end of a black dildo in order to feed her drug habit. Yawn... I mean, this film says more about what kind of overblown morality Americans are willing to accept in films than anything about drug abuse or its consequences. The anti-drug message descends into hyperbole and farce and I found myself laughing hysterically where I was supposed to be shocked and repulsed. Give me a break. These sanitised stories are just too ridiculous. As well as this, we are offered the same old, same old routine of white-powder-imagery and colourful-pill-popping. These guys injected something and were bopping around the place, next minute they snort something and they are all on the nod...go figure? And please, the heavy handedness of the junkie losing an arm...spare me, I am not that easily shocked or unaware of symbolism-overkill.