Way before Marijuana Movie Night was a pot leaf sparkle in my eye, I loved my booze. It was my passion and my poison. Never really got into the white stuff, but the glamour & grime made for stories of Shakespearian level tragedy. Scarface & Blow are some of my favorite Horatio Alger, American Dream gone dark tales of ambition. These are stories of hustle for capitalistic achievement, but what happens when that is the one & only goal? Crime does pay in both films, but Tony Montana & George Jung loose everything else.

Stepped away from big balled drug dealers, the middle & working class dabbling in coke led down dark paths a hell of a lot less glamourous. I recall a scene in The Boost where James Woods is on his hands & knees looking for just a few flakes of blow in the carpet. Half Nelson captures a junior high school teachers (Ryan Gosling) gradual descent from nose candy dabbling to smoking crack in a school public toilet. Not to be exclude are the Harvey Keitel’s expert self-medicating detective in Bad Lieutenant. Werner Herzog decided to reimagine this film by moving it down to post-Katrina New Orleans and casting Nick Cage as a bad back tortured cop in Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call New Orleans.

So cocaine is bad, but it’s hardly the bottom of the barrel when looking at the past several years of the U.S. opioid-deaths brought to you by corporate drug peddlers….ahem, I mean the pharmaceutical industry. And lets not forget about the real life nightmare of the weaponized opioid fentanyl which will kill you dead real easy.

Cannabis comrades, my goal is never to leave you in the dumps, even if I do get a bit ranting & raging in my posts. So maybe you skip all the above and go right to The Pusher trilogy. It is rough, gritty and fucking pull-the-teeth-out-of-your-head nuts. Plus there are three of them. Like Nicolas Winding Refn’s other work, there is a fine layer of sparkle to the sleaze so it’s hard to look away. These films were what Refn was up to before his Hollywood breakout with Drive. So take a long drag or a potent edible and decide which cocaine road you decide to walk. There will be highs. There will be lows. There she blows!