Oliver Stone on Tony Montana and America’s War on Drugs

When you're writing about a movie or you're writing about a guy like Tony Montana, how do you, you did, you walked this fine line of telling the story accurately, but actually making him likable in some strange way. Well he's not a hypocrite you see. He tells the truth as he says, even when I lie. He's a man who's free unto himself and I think that's what worked because the people around him are so corrupt. I mean the cops are corrupt in Miami. The system, the bureaucracy that pressed down on, by the way, I mean let's be honest, let's talk about the drug war. I mean this is an invention that's come about. It's a disaster. It's a bureaucracy of enormous billions of dollars are being wasted on fighting drugs with this super DEA and now they ice and all that whatever they want. We always create wars. We call it war on drugs, war on poverty, war on this, war on that. We make, that's the problem. We make too much of a bureaucracy. I noticed this in Vietnam. It bothered to shit out of me because we were sending five people, non-combat people over there for one, every combat person. We had an infrastructure, Las Vegas of the material. We had PXs. We had everything we wanted. They sent cars over there. A lot of this stuff was sold on the black market in the end by master sergeants making a buck on the side. There was a lot of shit going on, crime stuff. And the Vietnamese were benefiting from it. They loved the Americans, of course. They loved us. It's the same thing Afghanistan and Iran. It goes on and on and on. It's like we create these super bureaucracies around events. So what happened in the war on drugs is the same thing. And then I think that Pacino is a hero because in a way he sees it all. He sees it's all bullshit. And he calls it out. And I think people, I think a lot of people just picked up on it. They knew the war on drugs was a lie. Yeah. Well, most people today at least have a sense that it's not going well. Back then they thought, I think in the East. How many countries have we pissed off? How many countries have we told? Hey, you got to do it this way. We're coming down there. We're going to bust you. Speaking of Geraldo, did you ever see the footage where Geraldo was in Afghanistan and he's walking through the poppy fields that are being protected by US troops? Yeah, sure. And it's on Fox News. So he's trying to do this weird propaganda job of explaining why in order to get these poppy farmers to give us information about the Taliban, we have to somehow or another protect their crops. So we've got American soldiers. It's the crazy story. Well, then you find out that spectacular growth of heroin. Like heroin, just heroin sales and heroin use worldwide went up in an amazing manner. Yeah. This was born on, by the way, in the 1980s when we were supporting the Mujahideen against the Russians. Yeah. That's when it started. They were fighting for the poppy fields. Yeah. We're talking about billions of dollars here. Billions. Yeah. Some of these drug dealers, we don't even know their names, but they're well known in the Pakistani, Afghani world. Some of them are unbelievably rich. But it's so transparent. The poppy fields being guarded by US troops and them talking about it openly on Fox News and some, well, don't worry folks. This is why they have to do this. Like it's one of the weirdest parts of the war. Yeah. As was Dan Rather doing his standup at the beginning of the war about how we were fighting the awful Russians. They got us going on that. You didn't see that clip. When was that? Early in the war. Yeah. He brought the flag to Afghanistan, making heroes out of them. The guys we supported, we gave the most money was to Hekmatir, who was a drug dealer. We gave him the most amount of aid. Hekmatir, he's like the killer warlord. It's so strange. It's so strange how history repeats itself in different forms, just over and over and over again. In Vietnam, in Laos, there was a whole poppy growth. Yeah. And there was CIA shipping out. Air America, I remember that movie. Yeah. Yeah. I had a guy on who was in denial of this and I showed him the CIA drug plane that crashed in Mexico with several tons of cocaine in it just a few years ago. I'm like, this is a plane that had been to Guantanamo Bay multiple times. Like this is still going on. All that shit that happened with Barry Seals and, you know, you're talking about Iran Contremas. Yeah. I mean, that stuff's still going on. That's an ugly story. Yes. Very ugly. Yeah. The Barry Seal movie was okay. Other Tom Cruise. They got a piece of it. Yeah. But it was uglier than that. Yeah. We were basically, Reagan was selling arms to Iran, taking the cash and splitting it with the Contras. Yeah. The Contras were one of the most brutal groups, terrorist groups in Nicaragua, trying to, they were killing civilians, blowing up farms, scaring people. And we supported them. We supported a lot of bad guys everywhere in the world.