A review of Eugene Jarecki's Documentary Movie "The House I live in," about the consequences of the drug war and the way it has been prosecuted, with a few commentaries from the reviewer.

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Eugene Jarecki has produced a masterpiece of a film called "The House I live in." It is one that explores the multi-sided, multi-faceted problems of the meaning and consequences of America's War on Drugs.

I believe few who have seen the movie will disagree that the movie does a masterful job of using the drug war to expose and then to meld into a single fabric, the context, the subtext and the pretext of American society into a single blended narrative that constitutes a template for how American culture deals with its intractable social problems, a template that Jarecki himself compares with Hitler's final Solution.

The first half of the movie is the familiar history of America's drug war. That history contains many things that we Americans still pretend not to see or know about ourselves, and the way we have allowed our society to prosecute the drug war in our name. But this dark side of our contemporay history makes up only one component of the three components of the movie. 

The context is the eye level view of what is actually going on at a conscious level on the front lines of the drug war -- mostly on the streets and in the homes of America's inner city black ghettos everyday. But there are two other facets of the movie that are of equal importance and that I guarantee will set the viewer's mind on fire: First, there also is the subtext -- the much deeper themes that make up the root causes of the drug war, themes that attempt to answer the question: Why do Americans needs drugs so much more than most other cultures anyway?  And then it also tries to answer the question of how and why the use of drugs, and the drug war itself seem to fit so comfortably into the American way of life? 

Second, and finally there is the pretext, which is the collection of rationalizations, that allow us to continue pretending that we do not know or understand the causes or the consequences of the war on drug. Among such rationalizations is the pretense that we are unaware that we have willingly given our collective permission to prosecute the war in the destructive manner in which it is presently wreaking havoc on our society. The pretext of course is designed to give the whole sordid affair an air of innocence, a nervous looking public façade, a public face that does not disturb our everyday image of what our society is and how it works. It is the minimum collective self-image that we can live with unaided, that is, without feeling guilty about what we are allowing to happen in our names and with our permission. In short, we are content to allow the drug war to go on so long as it happens just beyond our collective peripheral visionand  just outside our consciousness. 

And as if this three-part variation on the themes of the drug war were not already enough, this director comes up with his own rather startling fourth part, where he comes to a very logical but surprising conclusion: That the set of steps the U.S. uses to prosecute the drug war actually parallel the same set of steps and follows the same logical trajectory that Adolph Hitler used to arrive at his "final solution" of the Jewish problem. This conclusion is a disturbing one for all the right reasons, and therefore is not one to be taken lightly since it is advanced by a man who lost most of his own extended family in the European holocaust.

Now allow me to now to try to explain each of these four parts of the movie in turn: 

The Context of America's Drug War

Jarecki's history is straight forward and tells us for instance that the casual use of cocaine, marijuana, and opium once was an exclusively white recreational preoccupation. At the turn of the last century for instance, all three drugs were used frequently as elixirs and home health remedies and at this time, it was done without any social stigma or sinister connotations attached to them whatsoever. Indeed, as is well known, cocaine was even a part of the original formula for the popular soft drink, Coke Cola, which is how it got its name. And, as well, the famous Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud both took the drug himself and administered it to his patients. 

However, as with many things that have been criminalized in American society, casual drug use became problematic in the racist white American mind only when it also became associated with interracial social contact generally, and with interracial black male on white female sex in particular. The movie shows how this familiar threat to uproot the American social order proved again to be the ultimate "boogey man," tone that scared and was exaggerated out of all proportions the fears hatched in the white racist mind. This well-known trope of fear-mongering was done over an extended period of time that covered the little remembered race-mixing of the prohibition era of the "Roaring Twenties," its acceleration during the Harlem Renaissance, and its continued increase during the Jazz Age of the 1940s and 50s, and its high point during the Civil Rights Movement, and the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. 

The draconian measure of criminalizing the use of all recreational drugs came to a head and was seen as a societal imperative by religionists who had long been pushing for stricter temperance measures, and then by racist demagogic politicians, especially those from the South, who supported the Church in its efforts to equate drug use with the ultimate sin. And as a result of this coalition of forces, the push to criminalization drug use never let up, It was a natural social force sure to gain support among winning white voters to what was seen as a Christian cause. It wasn't until the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s, and Nixon's "law and order" scare, that the drug war fully took root nationally. And of course, the "crack cocaine" breakout in the 1980s made matters infinitely worse and more urgent.  This is when Ronald and Nancy Reagan seized upon the drug war mantra of "just say no" as the moral centerpiece of Reagan's presidential tenure.

In short, in the context of this movie, the director gives us a factual and indeed a rather graphic history of the drug war. He does this by following up the descriptive history with a corresponding human history, one in which the life trajectories of several inner city victims is followed. And then by interviewing, in parallel, those on the other side designated to fight the war on drugs at its front lines, the so-call "first responders:" the police, the DEA, the social workers, NARCs, parole officers, and prison guards. 

What we learn from this part of the history is what we already have long known but continued to pretend not to know: That after 40 years and one trillion dollars of U.S. tax money, 45 million arrests, and 2.5 million Americans filling up our prisons, the war on drugs is still exactly where it began when President Richard Nixon declared it in 1971. 

We learn that, with the exception of the millions of lives of the families that have been destroyed either as a result of the drugs themselves, or more likely from the massive collateral damage of having the family's primary breadwinner in prison for long stretches of time, and the fact that nearly all of U.S. inner cities look like bombed out WW-II air raid damage, there are no positive results have accrued to American culture as a result of the drug war. This lack of any discernable positive results after 40 years of fighting the war, naturally begs the question: Could U.S. society have possibly been any worse off without having fought the war at all?

But this is not the most important message we get from Jarecki's history of the drug war in this film. Here we also learn in relief, that in the end, the drug war fundamentally is not about drugs at all, but is about lots of other societal things that animate American culture: like advancing the development of a new prison-industrial complex; about continuing to promote a broken-down embarrassingly unjust and cruel criminal justice system; about the trillions of dollars pumped into the U.S. economy illegally from illicit drug profits; and most importantly about how the U.S. uses the drug war to further as a shield to further divide U.S. culture into the "good guys" and the "bad guys,"  the "worthy" and the "unworthy"; into "winners" and "losers," into "job creators" and "slackers;" and as always, into the whites and the non-whites. 

The context of the film shows exactly how the battle plans to fight the war have been drawn up by the U.S. government, and generally how the two sides go about prosecuting the war. It is a lose-lose arms race of subterfuge in which each move provokes an unequal counter move -- with no winners and no improvements for U.S. culture in sight for the foreseeable future. Invariably, the only thing that seems to matter in this game of "good guys" versus "bad guys," is that the game must go on; and that it must always be resolved in favor of reinforcing the existing racist social order. IThe other unwritten imperative is that it must remain hidden from assualting the normal sensibilities of American social life. 

Thus what we learn from the movie's context is how the history of the "casual use of drugs" got started, and how it then morphed into criminalized social behavior as well as into a blueprint for more easily privatized business enterprises, and then, how this process was inevitably enfolded almost invisibly into cultural "business as usual."  

The Subtext of America's Drug War

The questions probed in the background or subtext of the movie are just as interesting and are much more important than the host of disturbing facts and scenes that have just been described and that appear in the foreground or context of the movie. The most important of them is this: Why is it that U.S. society is the carrier of a disease that requires constant anesthetization with drugs? 

The general answer, which the movie delves into ever so gently (leaving full explication of its themes as an exercise for the viewer) is the callousness, amorality and mindless greed of our capitalist industrialists, which, among other things are seen as being primarily responsible for destroying a whole culture of people's humanity by alienating people from themselves and from each other. 

But equally important is the fact that our capitalist industrialists also are seen as being responsible for creating a pool of discards in American society: those who have been robbed of their idenities and of their humanity by taking away their jobs and any opportunity for them to survive independetly. It is the jobless that are then treated as America's "disposable people." It is from this pool that a steady stream of "victims" from the war on drugs are recruited in a smoothly moving but cruel social process as fodder for American prisons. 

When people get laid off, when their jobs are outsourced, when they are fired, whenever they lack the training or educational opportunities needed to compete for existing jobs, invariably they perceive themselves as having only a cruel choice: to either wallow in despair on the margins of society, to take whatever jobs are left on the margins of the economy, or, as a last resort, to struggle to survive within America's underground economy. Since getting retrained to re-qualify for the jobs that once provided them a meaningful life are well beyond their truncated and diminished mindset, despair and joining the underground economy seem like the only meaningful choices to them. All other options are off the table because, at a minimum they require money, energy, confidence, motivation, or all of the above. But as it turns out, these all are precisely the qualities that "not having a job" wrings out of one's humanity.

Drug use and alcoholism and joining the underground economy are the default options of those wallowing in despair. Together they constitute the cruel but smooth two-step slide into America's social abyss: First, alcohol and drug use becomes a way of life that temporarily restores one's self-image and ones humanity. It is no accident that in American culture, drugs and alcohol become the best friends of the "down-and-out." Temporarily they restore them to their former selves, returning their previous humanity by restoring their confidence, making them happy and gay and allowing them to forget their diminished predicament. But these mental crutches can only do this for a brief moment and then the process must be repeated again and again -- but at higher and higher doses and at steeper and steeper costs for the jobless. 

Becoming an alcoholic or drug addicted are thus just an occupational hazard of being "down-and-out" in America. It is a hazard that without secure prospects for a job, will in the shortest span of time tend to completely take over one's life. Once snared, the jump from "user" to "pusher or dealer" depending on the drug of choice, is all but automatic. This is when things become very intteresting indeed, and the slide downhill deeper into the abyss, becomes proportionately faster.

Once "hooked" drug use is no longer a discretionary option. And being broke and addicted, makes dealing in drugs a survival imperative. This the reader will readily recognize as the familiar trap for our "disposable people" that fuels the drug war and snares so many young black inner city males -- those who make up the lion's share of America's "disposable people." In short, black inner city males constitute the fodder for America's war on drugs. And you can see them hanging out on any inner city street corner during working hours from Los Angeles and Detroit to Newark.

Put simply, the drug war is seen by Jarecki as a mere symptom of the larger "root causes" of corporate induced alienation and the stripping away of the identities and humanity of Americans into two groups: those who have jobs and those who do not. But even more importantly in defining and producing America's "disposable people," callous corporate policies such as "outsourcing" and globalization have also become a key component in keeping the drug war going. 

By "outsourcing" and "off-shoring" jobs, scavenging the globe like vultures in a race to the bottom of the barrel of the international labor pool, shrinking the tax base, union-busting, corporate propaganda, lobbying and demagoguing for their own greedy causes, America's industrial class cease to honor the unwritten social contract between the needs of the corporations and the corresponding needs of the American people. In the process, the movie shows how our new globalized capitalist economy has entered a new much more dangerous phase, one in which industrialists wield a very wicked and disproportionate amount of power and control over our democratic institutions, our democratic process over the lives of individuals, and and over the state as a whole. They do this at the same time that they deny and take no responsibility for the wreckage and damage that their policies wreak on American society. 

The Pretext of America's Drug War

 If he is to retain even a modicum of an image of being a proud self-reliant American, a rugged individualist in America's capitalist economy can never have an excuse for his failure -- other than that is, not possessing the necessary internal drive and will power to stick to whatever winning strategy is required for success. If he should ever come up short, American masculine honor demands that we must take complete responsibility for our failures. And until recently this guiding social and moral ethos of American machismo may have been the only true compass a laid-off American worker needed. 

However, now we have come to a fork in the road of American social policy and American corporate development, one that forces us to appreciate the fact that corporations do not just created the conditions that give rise to producing a whole class of disposable people, but that they also control all of the levers that would allow one to escape the newly created diminished conditions that corporations have created for them. By shrinking the tax base and buying up all political influence, corporate power, like a gargantuan Octopus, shapes every aspect of every American's life whether they want them to or not; and whether they are working people or not. 

Thus those who are defined as "disposable" have nowhere to turn. Corporations block all paths to identity, to survival and to personal growth and fullfilment. Plus, they are alienated from themselves and from each other. Unless American workers are willing to work for a wage that represents the least common denominator of the international labor market, laid-off Americans have no good options. This means that the American narrative of the myth of the self-made man allows no escape hatches for America's disposable people. 

It is only a palliative like alcohol or ,drugs that allow them to escape their dire circumstances even if it is only for a moment. Yet, we all promote the myth that the next job is just around the corner, knowing fullwell that for "disposable people," this is cruel hoax and is far from the case. We simply cannot admit to ourselves that we have a society that spends more tax money on imprisoning our disposable people than on educating them or providing viable work alternatives for them. When half a century ago futurists predicted the coming of this very era, they imagined that "the disposbale people" would be taken care of by the state and thus would be engaged in procutive activities in the arts, etc. Boy how wrong they were!

The Subtext of the Movie

What are the ultimate consequence of a callous, mean-spirited and uncaring society that produces disposable people and then fashions a legal system that imprison's them in unconsionable numbers, and an economic system that exploits their misery in equally large numbers, while walling them off from normal society? 

Jarecki, the son of a family many of whose members did not survive Hitler's mechanized system of death called "Final Solution of the German's Jewish problem, makes a compelling case in this movie that such a society is most likely to lead to a a repeat of the Nazi experiment in the ultimate disposal of unwanted people. Jarecki comes to this conclusion by examining the subtext of American society carefully, and then concluding that the steps that frame American society, its skeletal parts, parallel those erected by Hitler in his "Final Solution. 

Here is what Jarecki sees as constituting that parallel framework:

Step 1: Identify the culprit as an urgent menace to society. In Nazi Germany despite being a part of Germany's cultural upper crust, Jews were nevertheless identified as society's culprit, ite vermin, the feared "other." In post-modern America it is the black man, the low-level drug user, street criminal and pusher, who assumes the same role as Hitler's culprit and generic Jewish scapegoat. Both are seen as the prototype of the ultimate corrupting influence in the respective societies. 

Step 2:Ostracize and demagogue the culprit until hatred for them is internalized and can thus be stirred up to a fever pitch at any instant. In Hitler's Germany this was accomplished in a gradual but carefully government orchestrated campaign of anti-Semitism that reached a crescendo in November 1938 with Crystall Nacht. In the U.S., the same is accomplished informally by racial stereotyping and profiling, coupled with widespread arrest on trumped up charges -- as well as a result of daily political demagoguery -- as well as with a suite of race-based measures that depict blacks as being the ultimate drag on American society. In these images blacks are depicted as sex-crazed, baby-making machines, worthless deadbeats, or welfare Queens who live only for their monthly welfare checks.

Jews were forced to wear Yellow stars of David, and were openly harassed and humiliated. Inner city blacks are harassed by racist police, in humiliating street searches and thrown into jail on the filmiest of pretexts. In each case, the results are the same: society is given cultural permission just beneath consciousness to treat Sartre's proverbial "others," as vermin. This carefully prepares society for step three:

Step 3: Take away the culprit's means of survival so that he feels undeserving of any place in society except the "place" society has reserved and assigned to him. In both Nazi Germany and the U.S., systematic discrimination and denial of access to normal paths of success were blocked and thus used to force both Jews and blacks to internalize the negative identities and stereotypes their respective societies had assigned to them. 

But additionally, in the U.S., except for a few "tokens," like Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama, the price of access to a normal life has been raised immeasurably beyond a threshold where a non-professional working level black can aspire. This includes a virtual complete denial of a good education, jobs, and faair affordable housing. What is left for the victim in both cases is a choice between despair, or, dealing in the underground economy. For Jews it meant bartering away family heirlooms; seeking ways around German laws, etc.; for blacks the last resort is hustling on inner city streets -- as selling drugs on the street and engaging in pimping, and petty crimes, that is, maneuvering for a precarious survival in the underground economy.

Step 4: Isolate the culprit in a ghetto where he is cut off from society and any means of independent survival on his own. Then take away everything he owns and warehouse him so that he can easily be dealt with away from the prying eyes of society. In Nazi Germany, Jews were herded into ghettos in preparation for the final step: deportation to the East. All their property was confiscated. In crowded and unsanitary ghettos, they were blocked from any normal means of survival, and on pain of death could not leave the ghettos. 

On the other hand, while a few blacks that can afford it, and can indeed escape the inner city ghetto, for reason given in step three, most cannot leave. So they live out their lives adopting and then slowly adapting to a self-destructive culture of despair, becoming drug users and eventually being forced (in order to satisfy their drug habit or make a survival level living) into becoming drug pushers as well. 

Step 5: Change the laws so that the culprit can never return to being a normal citizen and can be concentrated away from the eyes of society where he becomes invisible and normal society's discard. In Nazi Germany, this is when the laws against Jews mandated their deportation to concentration camps in Eastern Europe. The trains were efficient and ran on time, even when they were more desperately needed to prosecute the war. 

In the U.S. the prison-industrial complex, through its lobbying efforts, keeps building bigger, more expensive prisons with full faith in the consistency of American discrimination, system of injustice, and racist traditions against blacks and poorer minorities that a reliable flow will be ensured well into the future. 

Plus with America's draconian 100-1 cocaine laws (recently reduced by Barack Obama to 18-1) and the three strikes and you are out law, which proscribes mandatory minimum sentences, and life sentences without parole for three crimes no matter how minor they are, the prisons are guaranteed to be filled with a fresh supply of young black men and other young poor minorities to fill the quotas needed by the prison industrial complex well into the foreseeable future. 

The American criminal justice system, as testified to by a number of those interviewed on the film, has become the gatekeeper of last resort and the turnstile that keeps fully one fourth of the black male population in jail, prison, or otherwise under the control of America's embarrassingly unjust criminal justice system.  This is rapidly approaching one million men. Once indicted for a drug felony, the suspect immediately begins to lose, his identity, his freedom, his property and all of his rights as a citizen. A convicted felon cannot vote, receive welfare, or healthcare, live in public housing, ever get a meaningful private job, and is automatically disqualified from any federal jobs as well.

Step 6: Eliminate the culprit from society altogether. The Nazi's "final solution" to their Jewish problem remains unchallenged as one of history's worst known human atrocities. Six million Jews were gassed and then their bodies burned in ovens. This was done in a technocratic bureaucracy of death yet to be surpassed in human history. 

On the other hand, in the U.S. war on drugs, we have a more indirect bureaucratic mechanism for effectively ending the lives of those admitted into our criminal justice system. They ener and are either never heard from againt, or they appear on our inner city streets as permanently crippled ghost, incapable of assuming the role of a viable citizen in the U.S. ever again. It is a slow-motion social death and thus the collusion of the criminal injustice system coupled with the prison industrial complex, has created a slow motion holocaust that spreads from the prisons to the families of those warehoused. The families too die a slow death. 

The wheels that turn the crank of this machinery, is America's one-sided color-coded criminal justice system, coupled with a profit-making prison industrial complex. One goes through the solemn motions of being fair and impartial, while the other goes through the motion of saving the government money as a more efficent alternative profit-making way of doing what the goevernment cannot do as well. Even though it is recognized by everyone, including those on the front line of the war on drugs that both systems are but cruel components of the same purposeful machinery, one that is purposely stacked and rigged against low-level black American drug users and pushers. It is one machine that rolls on like the trains and oven of Nazi Germany, one that until very recently, white Americans by and large were immune to and thus whites did not concern themselves with it. They ignored the slow-motion holocaust primarily because it was a system rigged against blacks and Latinos, not against whites. 

However, as this movie underscores (and it seems is always true of the evolution of American social processes), with the recent primarily white methamphidimine epidemic, the machinery once targeted only against blacks has finally jumped the color-coded tracks into the very heartland of white America. And, now, the fastest growing group of those who are imprisoned and warehoused are coming from America's white hinderlands of Nebracka, Misouri, and Iowa. It is also the small hinderland towns that have become dependent on the building of newer more sophisticated prisons that provide jobs for the "good people," so that they can continue to protect themselves from the "bad people."  Yet the very people that they scorn, also are the ones that provide them a salary -- as prison guards, prison doctors, nurses, and social workers -- and thus provide them an econmic reason for existing. It is a curious kind of human exchange: the survival of one humanity at the price of the death of another.  What a movie! Ten stars!

Authors Bio:
Retired Foreign Service Officer and past Manager of Political and Military Affairs at the US Department of State. For a brief time an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Denver and the University of Washington at Seattle. A graduate of the National War College and a Phd from the University of Southern California.