“The war on drugs is an epic fail”. During the brief history lesson, which spans from the Nixon administration to present day, Jay Z notes how the US prison population is larger than countries like Cuba and China-countries denounced as repressive by patriots-and how black people were arrested more often for drug-related offenses, even though stats show white people were more likely to use and sell drugs. “Drugs were bad, fried your brain and drug dealers were monsters – the sole reason neighborhoods and major cities were failing”. “No one wanted to talk about Reaganomics and the ending of social safety nets”. “Young men who hustled like me became the sole villain and drugs addicts lacked moral fortitude”, he says.
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Judges were dishing out life sentences on grounds of possession and low-level drug sales, Jay Z continues. He goes on to reveal how in the 1990s, incarceration rates in the United States were at an all-time high, “more than any country in the world” including Cuba, Iran, Russia and China.
Jay goes on to touch on mandatory minimum sentences that disproportionately affected blacks and Latinos, as well as the racism embedded in how drug laws were written and enforced. While wealthier white folks used coke in Manhattan, it was poor black folks in Brooklyn who were thrown in jail, Jay Z explains.
Now, with the legalization of marijuana in certain states, black and brown people are still held at a disadvantage in making a living off of selling the drug. He also discusses the challenges former felons, who were put away on marijuana charges, face when they intend to open legal dispensaries.
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In the video, called “A History of the War on Drugs From Prohibition to Gold Rush”, Jay Z narrates a story that begins in 1986 when he was “coming of age” during Reagan’s presidency and ends today, when he declares the war on drugs “an epic fail”.
