The overriding feeling one gets after viewing Eugene Jarecki’s powerfully disturbing prize-winning documentary about the ‘War on Drugs’ is a such a huge sense of denial. We may not have been aware of every fine line of detail that Jarecki includes in his far-reaching research but we are all aware of the problem to some extent and our personal avoidance of the issues in some small way makes us complicit with the real lack of will to want to confront it constructively. Just like society has done as a whole for the past 50 years.
The statistics are both horrifying and disgraceful in as much as the US may hold 5% of the world’s population, we contain 25% of number of people in jail, the vast majority on some drug related charges. Jarecki had historians prove how in the past decades US politicians had specifically criminalized what had been socially acceptable drugs as a way of imposing their racial bigotry. First with opium to bring the Asian community to task, then cocaine when it became the drug of choice of African American, and also marijuana as we simply could not abide those Mexicans taking our jobs and having fun.
The racial bias got worse with the appearance of crack cocaine which panicked legislators to introduce excessive mandatory sentencing that was 100 -1 worse than the penalties for powder cocaine. The figures to illustrate their fear are staggering : only 13% of the countries users of crack cocaine are black BUT 90% of them arrested are black. Go figure.
This ‘war’ …. the favorite term that scare-mongering politicians love to use …. has cost us $1 trillion dollars so far…. and it has made negligible difference to American drug consumption which is still the same. Apart from filling so many jails with long-term prisoners so that we simply cannot build enough facilities to house them all quick enough. The sick thing is, that prisons are the one booming expanding industry that we have in the middle of this economic recession.
Jareecki is thorough in his research and interviews and profiles judges to policeman, dealers to users, and the poor neglected families that spiral into more poverty when their bread winner is locked up again. He watches, he asks and he listens. The more he uncovers the more it makes the situation even untenable, as there is neither the will or even a hint of a solution for stopping or slowing down the whole demise of a sector of our community.
Pres. Obama signed a new Law to reduce some of the mandatory sentences but that wont help the guys serving life without parole for being caught with 5 gms of crystal meths. But then by the end of the movie, Jarecki leaves you with no real hope that anything will help them and all the other guys in similar circumstances. They are just a few of the many casualties and fatalities that you always get with a ‘war’. The most important thing Jarecki has done with this hard-hitting expose is shake us all up to want to do something about this horrendous situation. But will we?
Unmissable, but be prepared for a very sobering experience.Available from Amazon
