Tears
are shed and strings rise but director Eugene Jarecki hasn’t much business with
the hysterics of many modern documentaries. His sober, panoramic study on
America’s drug epidemic and its shadows in the past examines with surgical
precision the systematic process and human error which has led to it and the
seemingly hopeless state it finds itself in today.
Jarecki
sets the scene by focusing on the predominantly black crack business in the
projects of Yonkers NY. Everyone involved from the low end dealers to the
police force seem utterly jaded. The drug war is not the nationwide counter
offensive some would like to believe but a sluggish 9-5 operation. From here
Jarecki blows it wide open. We see the big business prison system, the racist compulsory sentencing laws and through an Abraham Lincoln historian, the frightening evidence
of history repeated. Most interviewees give over a tremendous amount but David
Simon (creator of HBO’s The Wire)
provides a rock at the film's centre; his interviews anchoring the film before driving it forward to it's earth shattering finale.
As the credits roll down it’s
difficult to know whether to ball your eyes out or throw a brick though a
window. The mind gets lost in the
frustrations of trying to contemplate something which has gone so far beyond
human control. This so called “war on drugs” is now a self-sustained and
systematic organism, healthily nurtured with greed and time. Steinbeck perhaps
summed it up best in the Grapes of Wrath,
that clinical study of the crushing forces of capitalism, when he wrote with
seething frustration: Where does it stop,
who can we shoot?.
Indeed.
Indeed.
