From Easy Rider To Blow, The Drug Movie Has Become An Addiction All Its Own

Director Martin Scorsese once said that movies are "really a kind of dream state, like taking dope." But a lot of movies these days are not just like taking dope; they're about taking dope. Just look at some of the recent Oscar nominees. In Traffic, a 16-year-old white girl lying in bed -- an odalisque with baby fat -- watches in a stoned reverie as a naked black man shoots heroin into her ankle. In Requiem for a Dream, a junkie Adonis probes for a vein in a black-and-blue forearm, while his mother is strung out on diet pills and TV game shows. In Almost Famous, a rocker on acid proclaims he's God and jumps off a roof into a pool. And now comes Blow, a drug-culture version of the American Dream -- starring Johnny Depp as George Jung, the entrepreneur who unleashed cocaine on North America in the 1970s.

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