Word: opium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...began in 1924, when she crossed the country in a Model T Ford, chronicling her travels in letters to her brother, who sent them to the New Yorker. She wrote for the magazine throughout her life, becoming its China correspondent in 1935. In China she became temporarily addicted to opium, befriended Mao Zedong and met her future husband, a British intelligence officer by whom she proudly had a child out of wedlock...
...Executive Order that subjects tobacco to regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. As a twist of the knife, the FDA claims its new authority over cigarettes by defining them as the delivery system for an addictive drug, nicotine. Alphabetically, that would put it after morphine and right before opium. Not exactly wholesome company...
McGregor's Renton fulfills all the requirements for his position as narrator, his spare intonations and face on close-shaven head giving good expression to all the horrors he must experience (not the least involving an opium suppository). Ewen Bremmer as Spud mugs more than Tim Roth at his most goofy, cowering and jerky...
...sailors based in Naples were arrested as they arrived at the Rome airport with 6 kg of Turkish heroin, expecting, as military personnel, not to be searched by customs. The sailors turned out to be couriers for Nigerians plying the Golden Crescent heroin trail. That route begins in the opium fields of Afghanistan, runs through refineries in Turkey and then the wholesaling hubs of Italy and terminates in needle parks throughout Western Europe...
Back on the movie screen, some of the big names besides Bertolucci were disappointing their fans. Robert Altman's Kansas City, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Miranda Richardson, shrouds the aimless bustle of its plot--kidnapping, murder and political maneuvering set against a 1934 jazz milieu--in an opium haze of dramatic anomie. Stephen Frears' The Van, third in the series that includes The Commitments and The Snapper, is a noisy mess, with shouting in lieu of wit and brawls stunt-doubling for character conflict. But this pub/pug violence was mild next to the atrocities in David Cronenberg's Crash...