25 Best Movies About Drugs Ever Made

13. The Wolf Of Wall Street

Universal PicturesThe Drugs: Cocaine, marijuana, Quaaludes, alcohol Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is as relentless a movie about drug-fueled debauchery as you can get. A blackly comic look at the life of Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in shouty shouty mode), the high-flying Wall Street trader whose shameless corruption landed him in jail, it depicts the consumption of enough narcotics to kill a dozen elephants several times over. Scorsese came under criticism for refusing to make a moral judgement about Belfort, but this criticism is ill-founded not least when you take into account Scorsese's similarly objective treatment of the gangsters and murderers which populate his other films. With The Wolf of Wall Street the depravity surely speaks for itself, and viewing it as condoning both the fraud which took place and the hedonism it subsequently fueled is surely missing the point. With the excess taken to the most extreme, absurd levels, DiCaprio's turn as Belfort on 'ludes, struggling with basic motor functions, is one of the best on-screen portrayals of drug use in recent years.