The War on Drugs

This is a dutch documentary which was televised in the netherlands in 2003, but its still quiet impressive.

The first minute is in dutch but after that its in english, with dutch subtitles.

There are two parts.

The Winners

The U.S. goverment spends $630 every second to fight drugs, every 20 seconds someone is arrested on suspicion of a drug offense and each day there are 117 people which are send to jail with a minimum penalty of 5 years. There are now over 2 million people behind bars partly because of this.

The by Ronals Reagan started 'War on Drugs' still rages on in full force. The main result is however not a decrease in drug use but the fact that every day, more money is earned. So no one will stop it: too many parties earn too much money.

When a new idea is being launched against the drug problem in the Netherlands, it often turns out that we are bound with hands and feet bound by international conventions that ministers are all to happy to hide behind.
It is clear that especially the U.S. coordinate and dominates the international drug driven by one motive: In their own country there rages a war for decades, "the War on Drugs".

This war, which has in Washington a budget of 37.1 billion U.S. dollars, is one of many superlatives, especially in business sense. The police has transformed from a crime fighter to a entrepreneur who arrests every potential drug crimenal with only one goal: the seizure of his money and his possessions

The mostly privatized prison industry with a population of over 2 million can cash in the positive operating results on Wall Street. The treatment industry must in turn try to keep hundreds of thousands of convicted addicts out of the the hands of the privatized prisons which has its own cost.

Cause of the 'War on Drugs, the contours of a society is laid visible that has combined profit maximization and morality with the drugsproblems, that threatens to criminalize a whole, especially black generation and thereby conjure up images of a drunken giant who does not know he is shooting In his own feet.

The Losers

What is the impact of this "perpetual motion" on the lives of many ordinary Americans. For if the war must continue, there always must be new victims.

Clearly the drug war Victimizes more and more people, particularly blacks, poor and women. The minimum penalty is drastically increased since 1986, people are rewarded when they turn each other in and their focus is on smaller, easy to arrest drug users.

After ten years this has resulted in a landscape of beaten families, criminalized neighborhoods and lost generations in some communities as well. In New York Alone this year, 50,000 children are on lists to be adopted or be placed with foster parents. The reason: Their mothers are all in jail.

Of course there are also innocent victims in this war. The executing agencies have been given unlimited powers to indict people. Nobody now seems safe for the more stringent policies of the U.S. government that only seems interested in one thing: Continuity of the war machine that is one of the biggest growth industries in American history.

Sorry for the poor video quality :(
couldn't get it better.