HOW TO MAKE MONEY SELLING DRUGS C
USA (100 mi) 2012 d: Matthew Cooke
Eventually feeling like little more than a libertarian
fantasy, where the film has the snarky tone of reality TV where they’re
constantly “selling” something, playing fast and loose with the facts, which
are in no way even a factor in this film, so pretty much anything sounding “on
message” passes for reality, even if it’s blatantly untrue, such as the
allegation that 90% of the inmates in
prison are there due to alcohol-related crimes, where a quick fact check, Crime
and Alcohol - Alcoholism - About.com, reveals it’s actually less than half
that, closer to 40%. But not to worry,
reality TV is mythically inaccurate as well, so this simply meets the “anything
goes” test, where the entire film is largely a propaganda campaign to legalize
drugs, as the moral of the story, from the film’s point of view, is Americans
should have the freedom to do what they please without the government
infringing upon that right. The argument
is made that alcohol and cigarettes are responsible for more deaths than drugs,
yet the government instead pours money into the drug wars, filling the prisons
with drug-related offenders, where Americans are just 5 percent of the world’s
population, yet we comprise nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population,
almost exclusively black and Latino, as those are the targeted neighborhoods
for making arrests, many receiving stiffer sentences than murderers. One of the worse cases was a black mother of
two children who left the city of New York looking for a better life due to
living in such a dangerous neighborhood and moved with relatives in the
Midwest, who happened to be selling drugs out of their home, which ended up
getting the mother arrested and sentenced to 27 years in prison, even though
she had nothing to do with drugs. The
severity of the sentencing matches the politicians decree to get tough on
drugs, but it in no way matches the non-violent, uninvolvement of the accused,
who posed no threat to anyone, yet must languish away inside a prison somewhere
while her children grow up without her.
The film is more of a bait and switch style, reeling in the
viewer’s interest by suggesting anyone, even children, can make money selling
drugs, witness the many young parentless teenagers who, having no other options
due to no fault of their own, are suddenly thrust into the situation, always
surprised at how many regular customers they can count on for selling drugs, outlining
how to carry out each stage of the operation from local street vendor to
running a drug cartel, where there are plenty of people willing to testify how
easy it can be, as the first half of the film is an overly sensationalist
owner’s manual guide that offers a get rich quick scheme to interested
viewers. But of course, while they’re
reeling off information on how easy it is, they’re ignoring all moral concerns,
figuring anyone who’s interested in the drug game would have to be criminally enterprising,
ignoring any and all consequences in the event you do get caught, not to
mention the effect this would have on your family. Instead the mantra for making money, “It’s so
easy even a child can do it,” is presented much like the high pressure
techniques used for selling timeshares in Boca.
While it’s presented in a slickly packaged, overly satirical manner up
front, literally making a mockery of the lucrative nature of the drug business,
where no educational diploma is needed and the profits can even outweigh the potential
jail terms if caught, as the money will be waiting for you when you get out
afterwards, the tongue-in-cheek manner is a veiled cover for the real reason
the film is being made, shifting gears midway through as the focus shifts to
who’s really profiting, as it’s not the guy down the street who inevitably gets
arrested, but cops, DEA agents, lawyers, judges, and prison guards, where the
United States government is awash with billions of dollars of anti-drug enforcement
money sent to various law enforcement agencies across the land, expected to
reach $19 billion by 2014, where local police departments suddenly have money
to upgrade their equipment, buy more sophisticated, high-powered weapons, add
military vehicles as part of their standard operations, even aircraft, and then
the government keeps feeding these budgets so long as statistics can verify
substantial drug arrests have been made.
All of this feeds the idea that you can arrest your way out
of the drug problem, filling the prisons with mostly non-white offenders, where
by 2011, 48% of all federal inmates were there for drug crimes, while only 8%
were for violent crimes. And while whites
and blacks have virtually identical rates of drug use, blacks are ten times
more likely to get arrested for pot, where the racial disparity is worse with
crack cocaine, where blacks comprise over 80% of federal crack cocaine
defendants, while whites are less than 7%.
While there are many more whites both buying and selling drugs in
America, blacks are 4 times more likely to get arrested, where 90% of those
convicted of drug charges are blacks or Latino, where more than 80% are for low
level possession, where at least a half a million individuals are serving time
for minor drug offenses, more than ten times the number in 1980, where in 1981
the government spent $1.5 million on the drug wars, while in 2012 the number
was $25 billion. While much of these
fast and furious statistics have a way of overwhelming the viewer, as they
continue to be spewed out throughout the film, better documentation is
presented in Michelle Alexander’s book The
New Jim Crow The
New Jim Crow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, suggesting the War on
Drugs is largely a tool for enforcing legalized racial discrimination, creating
a prison-state apartheid policy that is largely invisible to the middle class,
as a majority of young black men in large American cities are warehoused in
prisons, labeled felons, often trapped in a second class status of American
citizen with most of their rights stripped from them. While Alexander views the behavior as racial
injustice, this film has no sense of racial outrage, but only uses the numbers
as they help favorably make their case for legalizing drugs, viewed as similar
to cigarettes and the once prohibited alcohol, both of which pose a greater
danger to society, worse than all the illegal drugs put together. To demonstrate the absurdity of how out of
control the drug policy has become, the police are viewed as little more than
the Keystone Cops, where there is such a rush to arrest people that
wrong-address break-ins occur on average at least twice weekly by overeager,
trigger happy SWAT teams that break doors down in the middle of the night for
suspected non-violent drug crimes, where innocent people are also shot on a
regular basis during these often horrific confrontations, as these are, after
all, imperfect, often insufficiently trained humans conducting these
operations. The film suggests this is
like an unstoppable train racing dangerously down the tracks at our own peril,
where we’ve spent billions of dollars transforming police departments into
armed anti-terror squads that *will* come visit us in the middle of the night.
