The sexual liberation, which began in California during the 1960s, was accompanied by the recreational liberation. A weed from México brought temporary Nirvana to consumers and vast wealth to kingpins. In the 1970s, however, a powder from Colombia gradually replaced marijuana as the drug of choice among the affluent population. That drug was cocaine, colloquially known as "blow." Blow tells us about the American who was primarily responsible for the shift—George Jung (played by Johnny Depp). Indeed, thanks to voiceovers throughout the movie, Blow is Jung’s autobiography, though the screenplay is based on the book of the same title by Bruce Porter, with the subtitle How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cartel and Lost It All. When the initial credits roll, we see how the coca leaf is harvested and processed into white powder. We next see Jung assuring several men that the cocaine is of the highest grade, but that scene is repeated later in the film. The movie then reverts to Jung’s life as a child in Weymouth, Massachusetts. He observes his mother Ermine (played by Rachel Griffiths) hysterical about the minimal income earned his father Fred (played by Ray Liotta), who served as Jung’s role model and emotional supporter throughout his life. Nevertheless, when his father takes momentary bankruptcy philosophically, Jung resolves that he will earn a lot of money so that he will never experience economic hardship. In 1968, while in his early twenties, Jung and his close friend Tuna (played by Ethan Supliee) move to Manhattan Beach and meet pretty girls, all stewardesses. One of the girls, Barbara Buckley (played by Franka Potente), falls for Jung and introduces him to marijuana. When Jung realizes that easy money could be made by selling the weed around town, Barbara introduces him to the local supplier, foppish Derek Foreal (played by Paul Reubens), who is too busy with the world’s first male hair salon to sell the stuff. Jung and Tuna, however, have no job, so they have the time to be drug pushers, and they are extremely successful. Next, an old friend, Kevin Dulli (played by Max Perlich), arrives on vacation from Massachusetts. On learning about Jung’s lucrative business, he offers to be the New England distributor, pointing out that the offspring of the rich who attend small colleges near Weymouth have a lot of spending money but nothing much to buy. Stewardess Barbara and her friends offer to serve as mules from Los Angeles to Boston, and the business booms. Jung realizes that he can cut out the middle man (Derek) by buying directly from the source in México, so he charters an airplane, meets a grower, and soon profits soar. In due course, however, Jung is arrested, sent to a prison that is a school for crime, and meets Diego Delgado (played by Jordi Mollà), who is from Colombia. Upon release from prison, Delgado introduces Jung to Pablo Escobar (played by Cliff Curtis) in Medallín, and Jung becomes the principal supplier of the new drug to the United States, depositing his millions into Panamanian bank accounts, which are later expropriated by Manuel Noriega. After various doublecrosses, he is again arrested, skips bail, but is eventually betrayed by friends in a sting operation, and is imprisoned for a much longer sentence than before. Credits at the end say that he will be released from Otisville Penitentiary in 2015, if he lives that long; he appears senile in the final frames of the film. Interlaced with the story about Jung’s criminal activities is a depiction of his human qualities—his love for his parents; his love for his wife Barbara, who dies of cancer, presumably from too much snorting; his romance with golddigging Mirtha (played by Penélope Cruz): and his steadfast affection for his daughter. Directed by Ted Demme, the ying-yang portrayal shows that Jung was in many ways a product of his upbringing, a child of the 1960s, and a victim of the effort to criminalize substances that are sold only because Americans want to buy them. Blow provides an in-depth look at how the drug industry operates upstream (production, processing, transporting). For a look at the downstream drug trade, of course, we already have Traffic (2000). MH

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Blow
by Bruce Porter

The up-your-nose, in-your-face life of George Jung, the high-school football star from small-town USA who became the American linchpin of the Colombian cocaine connection. Relying on extensive interviews with Jung and other key figures, Porter (Journalism/Brooklyn College) recounts a sleigh- ride-to-hell story of how 60's hippie innocence turned into 80's megadepravity.