It looks like Gavin Newsom’s Current TV interview with director Oliver Stone at 11 PM tomorrow about Stone’s new movie Savages is going to be a doozy. Stone, explaining both the movie’s plot and his opposition to the drug war starts out with the genesis of the film: “We have the best weed inthe world—I’m telling you that from my own experience for 40 years,” he tells California’s Lt. Governor. “We started on Vietnamese weed, Thai weed, Jamaican weed, Sudanese weed and it was all great stuff. But now, actually, because Americans are so technically-minded and mad chemists—they have really taken the Afghan seeds from the Afghan war—that’s the hypothesis of our movie—and brought them to California, rededicated themselves and made the finest seeds in the world, the finest grass you could smoke.” Current gave me an exclusive first look at the interview:
It is, of course, an illustration of the disparities of the drug war that a prominent white director can talk so extensively about his drug use without fear of prosecution. But I’m more intrigued by Savages, which apparently is about border violence and the rise of drug cartels as well as Blake Lively living in a threesome with two drug-dealing brothers, than I was before I saw this interview. The more the drug war and the militarized culture it enables loses cultural credibility, the happier I am.
