The War On Drugs Has Screwed Black People and Now It's Coming for White People

[Fire Walk With Me]

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/americas-war-on-drugs-is-the-holocaust-in-slow-motion via Vermin Supreme


America is the world's most prolific jailer, with 2.3 million people currently squished together in its disparate cans. A quarter of those prisoners are doing time for drug offences, many of them users or small-time street dealers. While the old argument that drug legalisation would save the government a lot of time and earn them a lot of tax money still holds up, there's something we may have missed. Namely that cramming prisons with human lives is a very potent method of profiteering.

After 40 years, a trillion dollars and 45 million arrests, America's War On Drugs has achieved basically nothing, besides the incarceration of a hugely disproportionate number of black people (which would be a weird thing to describe as an achievement, really, unless you're a racist idiot). What it has done, however is create a huge industry that allows big business to profit from the imprisonment of low-level criminals and vulnerable addicts.

If there's one man you want to speak to about this, it's Eugene Jarecki. The acclaimed director of Why We Fight, Freakonomics and Reagan's latest documentary – The House I Live In – deals with the corporate exploitation of the American prison system.

VICE: Hi Eugene. What made you want to make this film?
Eugene Jarecki: Growing up in the wake of the civil rights movement, I anticipated a sort of post-racial America, where black people would be afforded the same opportunities as white people. As I got older, I started to understand that there's an invisible force blocking black progress in America – a huge part of which is the phenomenon of mass incarceration. The more I looked into it, the more obvious it became that the War On Drugs had reinvented, in a way, the kind of obstacles black people had triumphed over in the civil rights movement.

(More text, a video, and pics at the link.)

[NYC_SKP]

1. K/R (nt)

[msongs]

2. repubs + dems + president = ever more restrictive police state. thanks a lot nt

[Joe Shlabotnik]

3. We need more exposés of this shit,

because until it filters through the white middle class bubble, its not going to change. And what those in the bubble have to realize is that its no longer just some poor inner-city kid who never had a future anyway, its their lily-white precious sons and increasingly daughters that are in the cross hairs of this machine.

Our society is becoming a society of no-second chances, with an ever widening net of what constitutes criminal behaviour. Every misstep we say or commit is logged to be used against us. Vast numbers of people are becoming unemployable, unable to travel, afraid to speak up publicly or lodge complaints, are denied loans and mortgages, and are unable to even help themselves acquire the skills to lead 'productive' lives.

[nebenaube]

4. This

Our society is becoming a society of no-second chances, with an ever widening net of what constitutes criminal behaviour. Every misstep we say or commit is logged to be used against us. Vast numbers of people are becoming unemployable, unable to travel, afraid to speak up publicly or lodge complaints, are denied loans and mortgages, and are unable to even help themselves acquire the skills to lead 'productive' lives.

Deserves a thread of it's own.

[Live and Learn]

7. +1 nt

[Live and Learn]

6. +1 nt

[Jamaal510]

5. Even as a non-drug user and a non-smoker,

I can't help but feel sorrow for those millions of Americans who have had their lives ruined over a non-violent offense like this. Most of us are aware that the WOD has been a massive failure and a waste of taxpayer money. I'm starting to wonder if some of our elected representatives are being paid off by alcohol or pharmaceutical lobbying groups just to keep this war going because when you think about it, there is really no logical reason why drugs are still illegal while alcohol (which is just as unhealthy) is sold in stores. Whenever the prohibitionists say that drugs are harmful to people, so is locking people up just for getting high. It's long past time for 420 and other drugs to be legalized, sold and taxed in stores in addition to alcohol. Drugs need to be legalized, and we should fund drug recovery and awareness programs.

[Fire Walk With Me]

8. The war on drugs has been a tremendous success for the rich

and that' why it's not stopping

[CrispyQ]

9. This:

In my film, David Simon calls them "the extra Americans" – those we don't need any more because our factories are closed and we've shipped so many jobs overseas that these people have no function. So what do we do with them? Lock them up. And while locking them up, why not make a profit out of it?

What a sad, sad state our country is in.