Jay Z wrote and narrates a compelling four-minute takedown of the United State’s “war on drugs,” calling it an “epic fail.” Featuring illustrations by Molly Crabapple, “The History of The War on Drugs: From Prohibition to Gold Rush” was produced as an op-ed piece for The New York Times:
As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws — the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states — through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today. We learn how African-Americans can make up around 13 percent of the United States population — yet 31 percent of those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites.
Watch the video below.