One very interesting thing I’ve noticed about the production process was that they deliberately changed the focus from the oppressed character to the true believer (and decreased the intensity of oppression, the stuff that makes sense to the society shown but kind of steps on the parallels, and the anti-Semitism allusions) because things were getting too depressing and the writers wanted people to actually like the world and movie they’d created. It’s very similar to a recent trend (likely started by The Book Thief) of having the viewpoint character in fiction taking place in WWII Germany be a Nazi rather than victimized group.

I’d say the drug reference is stretching things a bit, as a large part of the plot was that it had only been documented in predators. A much closer analogy would be Native Americans and alcoholism. If you want a really fun war on drugs parallel, I’d recommend Cholera: The Biography, as it’s very interesting to see how society did and did not treat drug use as something infectious (I’ve been meaning to read the biography of AIDS, but I can’t tell if it’s from the same publisher or a different one using the same series name).

Similarly, I’d say that “cute” is used less like a slur than a stereotyping descriptor, much like what you’d get if you used the phrase “thrifty” (or “too Jewish”) in reference to a Jew.