I saw a documentary on the so-called war on drugs in America this evening, a 105 minutes program that was indeed mindblowing: "The House I Live In". It is made by the guy behind "Why we fight", which was a stunningly good documentary on the Iraq war years ago.
It was broadcasted on German-French TV channel ARTE, and will be repeated again on July 8th, 2 a.m. in the morning.
It gave insights and empirical data that not just linked contexts and facts that you would not expect to learn easily, and presented an amount of critical self-reflection and criticism of the installment of this war on drugs that is rare on TV these days, at least by German standards. The war on drugs has turned into an economic profit-making business branch that has already changed society as a whole, and not for the better, it has negatively affected the self-understanding of the police and the relation between police and civilian society, and has given the law system an unbelievable spin that send it pretty much off balance. That there also is an empirical link between the criminalising of certain drugs and the wanted "ghetto-isation" of certain minority groups to ban them from competing on the labour market, was not clear to me, not in that clarity at least.
The film does a very good job in explaining that the whole thing is far more complex and multi-levelled than ordinary pub-discussions usually recognize. And it paints a frightening picture of the future. Frightening not because of drugs, but because of what the society and the state is turning into.
The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival 2012.
This is the trailer.
And an introduction by The Guardian:
The official website:
http://www.thehouseilivein.org/
Highly recommended to see the whole show.
P.S. On a sidenote, I found it ironic that it was especially Nixon who seem to have understood the real complexity and nature of th problem better than any politician before and after him. Of course, cheater that he was, this insight did not stop him from nevertheless acting in violation of his understanding, for opportunistic powerpolitical reasons.
No pleasant outlook. And the American way to tackle the problem simply is very unjust, racist, and profit-led. It seem to aim at noit solving it, but to intentiknally boost and foster it to make the imprisonment industry (that'S what it is for sure: an industry) a regular branch of the ordinary economy.