Cannabis Kingpin

<p> Cartel, when linked with drugs, has become synonymous with mindless murder sprees as well as big bucks, and drug dealers are usually just the lowest link in the chain of a profitable industry of addiction. It wasn\'t always so. For a while, starting with the \'60s counterculture and running through the \'70s, drug dealers were legendary in many circles as romantic outlaws. Of course, this was less true of heroin pushers than dealers in cannabis, who inherited the mantle worn in Prohibition by rumrunners and bootleggers. </p> <p>Out on Blu-ray and DVD, <em>Mr. Nice</em>, by British writer-director Bernard Rose, captures that era without unduly romanticizing it. The light satirical tone, the gentle irony, spoofs the short-sighted naiveté of its real-life protagonist, cannabis kingpin Howard Marks, as well as the psychotic IRA commander and mellow-yellow LA phony with whom he partners. Rhys Ifans (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) is marvelously endearing as Marks, the Welsh boy from a sooty coal town who earns a scholarship to Oxford in the late \'60s. The innocent abroad soon discovers the goings-on down the hallthe sex and drugs and rock and poetry and general sense of heady fun. With little but dull career opportunities ahead, Marks becomes the Man who supplies the party with pot and hash brownies and eventually takes his business to the world.</p> <p> <em>Mr. Nice\'s</em> implicit position is that Marks\' crimes were victimless even if he was too besotted by the thrill of the game to realize that, inevitably, he and his family would become victims. \"War on Drugs,\" he sniffs when Reagan took office. \"How can you make war on a plant?\" Good question, but the U.S. prosecuted its war without distinguishing pot from crack. He was nailed. </p> <p><em>Mr. Nice\'s</em> settings are as important as the secondary charactersthe surface appearances of the tapestried counterculture and the futurism of late Modernism wrap the picture in an appealing frame. </p>