Nick Cave – currently doing the media rounds as incendiary quote machine screenwriter of John Hillcoat’s new Prohibition-era crime drama Lawless – isn’t quite done telling America how to run itself.
After attributing US violence rates to their history, gun laws and culture (“Guns are part of the American psyche…This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It’s intrinsic to the American psyche. It’s never going to change.”), Cave has now taken aim at America’s drug policy, drawing a Lawless-adjacent parallel between the failure of prohibition and that of the “war on drugs”.
“It doesn’t seem that the current policy with drugs works in America, or, well … anywhere. I’m not expressing the views of anyone else involved with the film, but I think drugs should be legal,” he told Spinner this week.
The musician’s views are shared, to a lesser degree, by journalist and A Small Book About Drugs author Lisa Pyror who told us last year that decriminalising drugs such as ecstasy and marijuana would effect more positive change in Australia than negative: “The more criminalized and underground something becomes the higher the instances of things like HIV and Hepatitis C. Also it would lift the burden on police and the taxpayer with regard to policing and processing drug users. And it would divert revenue streams from criminal organizations. Maybe we do have to accept that 700,000 people a year in Australia are going to try ecstasy and we can’t do much to prevent that. It seems crazy to hand that market over to organized crime to profit from.”
We’re counting down the days.
In the meantime, you can still get high (legally) by watching Grinderman videos.
