Jay-Z narrated a New York Times op-ed video condemning the war on drugs in collaboration with illustrator Molly Crabapple.
The op-ed promotes Jay-Z’s short film, “The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail,” which according to The New York Times, follows a timeline taking us from the Nixon administration to the Rockefeller drug laws, continuing on to the bizarre growth in the prison population to today’s marijuana market.
In the nearly four-minute video, the rapper attacks the hypocrisy of “the NYPD (raiding) our Brooklyn neighborhoods, while Manhattan bankers openly used coke with impunity,” 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,” the New York Daily News noted.
Variety described the video as "part history lesson, part call to action."
“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 spirited video.
“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.”
Jay-Z’s words shed light on what some view as an upside-down operation in our judicial system. According to the Times, African-Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, and 31 percent of those arrested for drug law violations, despite using and selling drugs at the same rate as whites.
The multimedia project was initiated by Dream Hampton, the filmmaker and co-author of Jay-Z’s book “Decoded,” the Times noted. In coming up with the idea, Hampton wanted to address a question that was posed by Michelle Alexander, the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
In the book, Alexander poses the question, “Why were white men poised to get rich doing the very same thing that African-American boys and men had long been going to prison for?”
This issue has created a new conversation as policy makers are now joining advocates who are demanding “an end to biased policing and mass incarceration.”
In November, California residents will have the opportunity to vote in favor of Prop 64, “the most racial-justice-oriented marijuana legalization measure ever,” the Times noted.