Jay Z Explains Why the War on Drugs is an ‘Epic Fail’

The New York Times teamed up with music mogul Jay Z and illustrator Molly Crabapple to release a short op-ed film Thursday critiquing the United State’s war on drugs.

The film, which is titled “A History on the War on Drugs: From Prohibition to the Gold Rush,” is written and narrated by Jay Z, and is described by the Times as being “part history lesson about the war on drugs and part vision statement.”

Paired  perfectly with Crabapple’s vivid animations, Jay Z  critiques the double standards existing between drug dealers–more specifically between poor people of color and their wealthy white counterparts.

The project was proposed last year by Dream Hampton, the filmmaker and a co-author of Jay Z’s book “Decoded.” According to the New York Times:

Ms. Hampton wanted to tackle the contradiction raised by Michelle Alexander, the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” in 2014: Why were white men poised to get rich doing the very same thing that African-American boys and men had long been going to prison for?

“In 1986, when I was coming of age, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the war on drugs, that had been started by Richard Nixon in 1971,” Jay says in the beginning of the film of the Nixon administration. “Drugs were bad, fried your brain and drug dealers were monsters, sole reason neighborhoods and major cities were failing.”

He goes on to explain how the federal government made a distinction between people who sold powder cocaine and people who sold crack cocaine, even though they were the same drug, but were consumed differently. This led to courts handing out mandatory life sentences for low-level drug sales–that just  so happened to specifically target African Americans. Jay Z says,

Even though white people used and sold crack more than Black people, somehow it was Black people who went to prison. The media ignored actual data to this day, crack it’s still talked about as Black problem.

For years people have struggled to understand the topic of mass incarceration of African Americans, especially since they make up around 13 percent of the U.S.  population, yet are 31 percent of those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites. This visually stunning op-ed continues to open up the dialogue on this topic, as well as help strive for necessary changes to our flawed judicial system

For a full transcript of the film click here

Watch the Video Below

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.