Jay Z Has Released A Short Film Slamming The War On Drugs As An “Epic Fail”

Jay Z has taken aim at the US government’s war on drugs in a new video for the The New York Times animated by Molly Crabapple. In the video, titled “The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail”, Jay Z rips into decades of government policies that have targeted the African-American community and led to record high incarceration rates in the US.

“Rates of drug use are as high as they were when Nixon declared this so-called war in 1971,” Jay Z says in the video. “Forty-five years later, it’s time to rethink our policies and laws. The war on drugs is an epic fail.”

Jay Z’s music regularly touches on his time as a drug dealer when he was growing up in Brooklyn. In the video Jay Z criticised mandatory jail sentences for low level drug dealers, pushed by President Richard Nixon. He also slams the legal distinction between powder cocaine and crack cocaine, and accuses the media of talking about crack cocaine as though it was only  a “black people’s problem”.

“The war on drugs exploded the U.S. prison population, disproportionately locking away black and Latinos,” Jay Z argues. Last month Junkee covered attempts by the US federal government to lower the prison population and phase out the use of private prisons.

According to an accompanying article in The New York Times the film idea came about when “Dream Hampton, the filmmaker and a co-author of Jay Z’s book ‘Decoded’, approached the Drug Policy Alliance about collaborating with Revolve Impact,” a social impact agency that connects artists with community organisers. The aim of the video was to try and highlight “Why white men were poised to get rich doing the very same thing that African-American boys and men had long been going to prison for.”