Made for the New York Times, and published today, the below short film, titled “A History of the War on Drugs – From Prohibition to Gold Rush,” is the end product of a collaboration between dream hampton, Jay Z, Molly Crabapple, Jim Batt, and Kim Boekbinder, and is part history lesson about the so-called “war on drugs,” and part argument against that same war.
Jay Z narrates over Molly Crabapple’s illustrations, as the film takes us from the Nixon administration’s draconian drug laws, through the resulting exponential growth in the USA’s prison population (with emphasis on how this has disproportionately affected African Americans especially), to the emerging legal marijuana trade of today.
Ultimately, the short asks the question: “Why are white men poised to get rich doing the same thing African Americans have been going to prison for?”
As Jay Z emphatically concludes at the end of the piece, and, in effect, answers the above question asked: “The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail.”
Watch the short work below:
