I’m going to be upfront with you: I used to do a lot of cocaine.

Unlike our main character Eddie Grant, a once-successful and now floundering real estate agent, I didn’t do coke to be hip with the yuppies of Los Angeles (or wherever the fuck) and work 18 hour days; I did it to stay thin. If you know me, you know I was anorexic for a long time, overdid it a bit*, and landed myself in the hospital and under a strict refeeding plan. What I’m saying is ole Eddie here probably had a better or at least more lucrative reason for doing all that coke, but I probably had more fun.

I love watching movies about drugs because I feel like there are few things I know more than drugs and how to do them, and I love watching squares really fuck up how drugs work. For example, today my friend John and I covered Action Jackson for my podcast. Action Jackson rules all over the place, but Vanity’s character is always doing what I assume is supposed to be heroin with the most ancient 1876 era needle and shooting it into her upper thigh.

She seems to do it once a day but by the end is jonesing all over the place. Thats not how any of that works. Where’s the artfully, skillfully accessed vein? Where’s the orange capped syringes of my youth? Where’s the works? It’s annoying to me!

Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction makes cocaine sound way fancier than it is. Sure, it’s a rich man’s drug, and sure Eddie starts dipping into his son’s college fund, and sure it shows his nose gushing at one point and he’s all wild-eyed and sweaty and Jeffrey Tambor is trying to get him to admit he has a problem, but calling this film “One Man’s Seduction” just seems to oo-lala for me. Cocaine is a disgusting drug. It’s nasty, it makes you filthy, it makes you annoying, it’s too expensive, and you need to keep taking it to make it last. I can’t believe I spent so much money on it in my past. Why did I do that? I could have had a SoCal house by now. This movie should be called Cocaine: Another Dumdum Fucks His Life Up.

This movie aired on NBC in 1983 so it’s not like we’re dealing with Requiem for a Dream style drug use here. But what annoys me if everyone keeps telling ole Eddie that he’s “jonesing” and I’m sorry, you can’t use jonesing for a drug that isn’t physically addictive. No one is going into cocaine withdrawals. But Eddie overdoses on coke and ends up in the hospital and his poor stupid wife is like “I didn’t know!” And their son, Buddy, is like “I totally knew and also everyone in my school does drugs but I am a good boy who never does anything wrong.”

Buddy is played by James Spader, natch.

I love old tv movies, as I mentioned back when I rewatched Fallen Angel. This one is a fun little watch if you have 90 min or so to kill. Yes, it’s on Tubi.

*I overdid it a lot.