The War on Drugs is an “epic fail,” Jay Z argued Thursday in a blistering animated op-ed for the New York Times.
The rapper narrating his withering indictment over furiously scrawled illustrations from artist Molly Crabapple echoed a widely held view that drug laws implemented by President Nixon and enhanced by Ronald Reagan had disproportionately targeted black and Latino men, with few results to show in 2016.
“Drugs were bad; fried your brain. And drug dealers were monsters, the sole reason neighborhoods and major cities were failing,” Jay Z said in the nearly four-minute video, the concept for which was pioneered by filmmaker Dream Hampton.
“No one wanted to talk about Reaganomics and the ending of social safety nets, the defunding of schools and the loss of jobs in cities across America. Young men like me who hustled became the sole villain, and drug addicts lacked moral fortitude.”
The hip-hop mogul went on to chronicle the massive spike in U.S. incarceration rates during the 1990s, mandatory minimum sentencing that put low-level drug offenders behind bars, New York’s severe Rockefeller drug laws and the crack epidemic.
“Even though white people used and sold crack more than black people, somehow it was black people who went to prison,” he said. “Crack is still talked about as a black problem.”
Jay Z blasted the hypocrisy of “the NYPD (raiding) our Brooklyn neighborhoods, while Manhattan bankers openly used coke with impunity,” as well as Crown Heights kids getting slapped with citations while “kids at dorms in Columbia, where rates of marijuana use are equal to or worse than those in the hood, are never targeted or ticketed.”
Even in states like Colorado with an above-ground drug economy, he argued, former felons face barriers to entry while venture capitalists are free to “open multi-billion dollar operations.”
“Rates of drug use are as high as they were when Nixon declared this so-called war in 1971,” Jay Z concluded. “Forty-five years later, it’s time to rethink our policies and laws. The War on Drugs is an epic fail.”
President Obama, too, has spoken out passionately on the country’s antiquated and unfairly harsh sentencing laws for nonviolent drug crimes.
In late August, he commuted the sentences of another 111 federal inmates bringing his total number of shortened sentences to 673, more than the previous 10 presidents combined.