Politics & Power Quote by Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh is naming the quiet rule that turns drug policy into theater: the script demands moral certainty, not empirical honesty. As a director, he’s attuned to how institutions rely on fixed roles. In this one, policymakers and cops aren’t allowed to be characters with mixed motives or nuanced beliefs; they have to perform righteousness. The line “cannot acknowledge” is the tell. It’s less an accusation of private hypocrisy than a diagnosis of professional survival. Admit complexity - that some drug use is recreational, self-medicating, culturally embedded, or less harmful than legal substances - and you risk looking “soft,” untrustworthy, politically radioactive.

The subtext is that the “war on drugs” isn’t just a strategy; it’s a moral identity badge. Once drug use is framed as “inherently evil,” the state’s response can only be punitive, and questions about harm reduction, decriminalization, or treatment get recast as ethical lapses rather than policy options. That’s why he leads with “frank discussion”: the failure isn’t ignorance, it’s a refusal of candor built into the job description.

Contextually, Soderbergh has spent a career circling systems that require denial - from sex work to contagion to capitalism - and watching how public narratives flatten messy realities into digestible villains. Here, “inherently” does a lot of work: it blocks the very idea that outcomes can vary by substance, dosage, setting, and social conditions. The quote lands because it exposes the simplest censorship mechanism of all: not a gag order, but a moral premise you’re not permitted to question.