Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Jello Biafra
Osama bin Laden
Tomm Chong
Joe Rogan
Eddie Bravo
Freeway Ricky Ross
Countless famous suit-wearing shitheads
Directed By:
Kevin Booth
AMERICAN DRUG WAR: THE LAST WHITE HOPE is an outstanding documentary. It's a gold mine of information about the last great conceptual war America was waging before declaring war on terror after the 9/11 bombing. Makes you think, how convenient it is to wage war to a concept. Nobody likes drugs or terror, nobody wants to associate with those. So there's a vaccuum as to define what you're chasing at all. So you can do whatever you want and chase whoever you want, because nobody knows exactly what you're chasing. Waging war on an invisible, intangible enemy might just be the latest hip form of totalitarian state. The citizens are kept in the dark and sleep on both ears, thinking their government is doing important business, when they're only making things worse. AMERICAN DRUG WAR: THE LAST WHITE HOPE examines a few terrible crimes that were committed by the American government during their crusade against drugs. It's fascinating and very frightening all at once.
Peep this. Crack cocaine arrived in the U.S in retail quantities during the eighties and the first really successful drug lord was a guy named Freeway Ricky Ross. The man was literally called "The Wal-Mart of Drugs". He's been made to be the boogeyman of his time and the Reagan/Bush administration triumphantly locked him up and threw away the key. Well, documentarist Kevin Booth went to prison and had a talk with Ross, who revealed to be a fascinating character. Not intimidated by the prison warden who refused to let cameras anywhere near Freeway Rick, Booth interviewed him over the phone and his subject charisma was more than enough to hold us captivated. Turns out that Ricky Ross isn't some kind of Tony Montana character who flew to South America to set up a drug factory or anything. He said (going from memory here):
"People don't know what it is to come home and have nothing to eat. They don't know what it is to go to the supermarket and eat cookies while walking the aisles, just so you have something to eat. I went in the drug trade for the money. I saw an opportunity to leave the condition I was in"
That opportunity for Ross, was a mysterious Latino guy named Danilo Blandon. He brought to America, the drugs that Ricky Ross sold in the street. That Blandon guy was some military type from Nicaragua, who was financing a war against the Sandinista Communist Army who overran his country. He was financing the "freedom fighters" of Ronald Reagan, who were pushing communism outside of the Americas. Drugs were imported in the United States to finance the war on another concept. They ruined a ton of lives, including the director's brother life, while creating a gigantic and ever complex money machine that is the drug enforcement industry. That was chronicled in a book called DARK ALLIANCE by journalist Gary Webb, who was responsible for the CIA scandals in the nineties. Since then, Webb has taken his own life, harassed by some mysterious followers after he created so much trouble for the agency.
See, that's another amazing part of this documentary. The prison system of the U.S has a lot of private institutions. It's a business. Kevin Booth went to visit one of those prisons in Arizona, ruled by a man named Joe Arpaio, a fierce adversary of drug abuse. The place is overcrowded and the inmates are sleeping in tents in the courtyard. Most of these guys are there for possession of drugs. They are drug addicts with a problem, rather than actual criminals. Granted I wouldn't like to know most of them, the majority of these guys need support rather than punishment. Instead, they're working in chains gangs, doing labor almost for free. It's profitable to have addicts and it's even more profitable to lock them up, away from the respectful citizens. You make money and you maintain the illusion of safety.
Watching AMERICAN DRUG WAR: THE LAST WHITE HOPE is alarming, but it has an truthful value and a humanity that goes beyond racial stereotypes and institutional bullshit. The boogeyman that made you fear for your kids' safety might not be the ones you've been told to look out for, but the ones you pay your taxes to. Kevin Booth's outlook might not be the most objective one, but he's speaking from the point of view of a victim. AMERICAN DRUG WAR: THE LAST WHITE HOPE is an essay-ish documentary that makes a very good point. You're not safe and the people who tell you that you are, might just be the people you want to protect yourself from.
SCORE: 95%