The House I Live In

4.5 stars... Raising pointed questions
This movie is the latest documentary from writer-director Eugene Jarecki, who has previously brought several other interesting and acclaimed documentaries, including 2006's Why We Fight and 2010's Freakonomics. Now comes Jarecki's latest.

"The House I Live In" (2012 release; 108 min.) is a detailed and critical look at "the War on Drugs", now more than 40 years on since President Nixon declared that war in 1971. The filmmaker starts at home, literally, as his revisits with his family's (black) nanny from his days growing up in suburban Connecticut and New York in the 1970s. As it turns out, the lady has lost several family members, including a son, to drugs. From there Jarecki interviews lots of different people, from jailed drug dealers to a US federal judge to a prison security guard, and on and on. One of the historians interviewed claims that the criminalization of drugs goes back to the beginning of the 20th century (when opium was outlawed to deal with the...

Required viewing for those who want to be informed about the engineered die off going on in the United States.
Economists use the term "excess population" often to describe families and individuals that, due to sudden economic change, are useless or no longer needed by society. We are living in our own version of the potato famine. This movie shows how the lower economic classes in the United States are being systematically preyed upon and wiped out by the corporate run prison system.

Eye-opening & heart-wrenching
A really stunning look at reality for those who have bought into the villainization of drug users and sellers that has been the norm of American media and entertainment for decades. This film helped me to learn about the elephant in the room when it comes to U.S. politics, justice, and economics. Here's my full endorsement: Thanks for the education!

One thing that the film doesn't explore much is solutions. However, it does tell us what and where the roots of the problem are. The roots are in floundering desperation which exists because we cause it with prejudice, bigotry, miseducation and corralled poverty. The "drug war" is one aspect of a war on the poor. Ending the drug war is the implied solution, but the film's elucidation portends just how complicated and far-reaching that end would be. Ending the drug war would mean putting a big hole in the budget of many law enforcement agencies, for one thing, and it would impoverish some rural communities where the main business...

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