Jay Z has teamed up with video artist Molly Crabapple in a four-minute opinion piece for the New York Times, in which he declares the long-running war on drugs an “epic fail”.
In the PSA video, the 45 year old rapper – who used to deal drugs before he made it big in the ‘90s – details how the policy started in 1971 under Richard Nixon and continues nearly half a century later, failing to do anything about the problem but negatively impacting African-Americans and Latinos.
Jay Z narrated a video about the war on drugs for the New York Times
“Drug dealers were the sole reason neighbourhoods and major cities were failing,” he narrates in the video, outlining the official line taken which didn’t the true problem. “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.”
“Rates of drug use are as high as they were when Nixon declared this so-called war in 1971,” he explains. “Forty-five years later, it’s time to rethink our policies and laws. The war on drugs is an epic fail.”
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The upshot of the policies was a dramatic rise in the incarceration rates among ethnic minorities in the US, with 200,000 Latinos and African-Americans imprisoned for drug-related offenses in 1971 to over two million in 2016.
“Even though white people used the sold crack more than black people, somehow it was black people that went to prison. The media ignore actual data to this day,” he adds. “Crack is still talked about as a black problem. The NYPD raided our Brooklyn neighbourhoods while Manhattan bankers openly used coke in impunity.”
The video comes soon after Jay Z (real name Shawn Carter) spoke about police killings of black men, and released the song ‘Spiritual’ after the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in July.
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