12.18.2006
TeeVee Cop, Propaganda Minister
Pay attention if you ever watch the Dragnet episode, Big Seventeen. Made in the 1950s, it’s instructive how facts can be skewed as part of The War On (Some) Drugs.
Dragnet was produced by Jack Webb who also starred in the series as Detective Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department. Friday is an ideal cop to the point of being an unemotional cyborg: he mechanically goes through his paces without encountering any gray areas.
In Big Seventeen Friday and his partner are called in to investigate a riot at a neighborhood movie house. Apparently some teens went nuts in the lobby, smashing up the place. Was it because the matinee that afternoon really sucked? No. You see the answer seems to lie within a small cardboard box left behind at the scene. Inside the box are a couple of “marijuana cigarettes,” seen in a close-up.
But later on when one of the riotous teens is being interviewed at the station, he fesses up, explaining he and his buddies have also been doing yellow jackets and bennies. But since we don’t see those drugs, we only see the joints a couple of times up close, then the inattentive viewer is lead to think that pot, not amphetamine pills, turned the teens into violent maniacs.
Of course, it’s a known fact that pot leads to the harder stuff. The leader of the doping delinquents ends up shooting some heroin. He’s found face down in a pool in the park, D-E-D.
During the investigation we see Friday and his partner sucking on cigarettes, the tobacco kind. Nicotine fiends. And it’s a known fact that cigarettes lead to the hard stuff: alcohol.
But it’s all about The War On (Some) Drugs.
# posted by Stan Spire @ 6:17 PM 
