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Don't Try This at Home: Lessons from America's War on Drugs

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Don't Try This at Home: Lessons from America's War on Drugs Transcript Don’t Try This at Home: Lessons from America’s War on Drugs Eugene Jarecki Filmmaker; Director, The House I Live In Chair: Professor Alex Stevens Professor in Criminal Justice and Deputy Head of School, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent 21 May 2013 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/ speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions, but the ultimate responsibility for accuracy lies with this document’s author(s). The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. Transcript: Lessons from America’s War on Drugs Alex Stevens: Good evening, everyone. Welcome to this fascinating event at Chatham House. My name is Alex Stevens; I’ll be chairing the event. I’m professor in criminal justice at the University of Kent and I’ve been working with Chatham House for the last year or so on their project on drugs and organized crime. I’m also a board member of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy, and I’m just back from Bogota, Colombia, where we had our annual conference and discussed many of the issues that Eugene’s fascinating film touches upon. The format of this event is that Eugene will be showing some clips from his film and we’ll be talking about those clips. Then there will be a time for me to ask him some questions and also for you to ask him some questions. We’ll be finishing at quarter to eight and there is a reception after that. Our speaker this evening is Eugene Jarecki, a filmmaker of prodigious output. In 2002 his film The Trial of Henry Kissinger won the Amnesty International Award. In 2005 his film about the military-industrial complex, Why We Fight, won him his first Grand Jury Prize from the Sundance Documentary Festival [sic]. In 2010 his short Move Your Money encouraged Americans to move their money out of banks that are ‘too big to fail’ – a recommendation we could all follow. He also directed a documentary based on the book Freakonomics. His most recent film is the one he is here to talk about today. The House I Live In opened at the Sundance Festival in 2012 and also won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. It’s a fascinating account of the drug war in America. I think Eugene is here to tell us that this is not an example we should be following at home, with his theme ‘Don’t Try This at Home’. Ladies and gentlemen, Eugene Jarecki. Eugene Jarecki: Indeed, the theme of my week – I’ve never come to Britain before with a theme, but I might as well have stepped off the aircraft carrying a picket sign that said on it, ‘Don’t Try This at Home’, because I think there’s a crucial moment happening in the US–UK relationship. Britain finds herself sort of teetering in between extremes in the world – the extreme on the one hand of America’s deeply misguided approach to the issue of drugs as a national issue for us – and as a global issue – and then on the other hand the European example, where there is more and more progressive and quite www.chathamhouse.org 2 Transcript: Lessons from America’s War on Drugs informed effort and change going on. Britain finds herself worse than Europe but a lot better than the United States. So when I say ‘don’t try this at home’ to a whole country, and I want the country to be very aware and very afraid of the example that the United States has set, I do so not only because I feel a need to speak beyond my own nation’s borders about the tragedies that we’ve inflicted on ourselves and on the world with a wrong-headed set of policies, but also because Britain can in fact, I believe, make a difference in multiple directions. Were Britain, for example, to move into a more informed and wise and sound and compassionate and effective direction with drug policy, it would shame the United States. It would further isolate an already increasingly isolated United States on this score. The United States always takes great comfort in seeing that her British ally is such a great supporter of this, that or the other, whether it’s the Iraq war or others that we get ourselves involved in. So I think it would send a very good message to the United States to see the British public and, in turn, British leadership move away from the excessive severity that is unfortunately already at work here to some degree, and coming down the pike when you least expect it to another degree. It also would reconfirm the efforts of other countries in the European Union, especially Portugal and other countries that have set themselves apart through their extraordinary efforts to be more progressive and enlightened about this. So it’s with that in mind that I’m here tonight to show bits of my film. In the interests of time and having a good discussion with Alex and yourselves, the choice was made not to show the whole film, because it’s an hour-and-forty- five-minute epic – that you can watch another way, you can go to thehouseilivein.co.uk and download it or get the DVD. It also shows occasionally on BBC Storyville. So there are other ways to see it, and it’s probably already pirate-able – and I’m happy to encourage you to steal it if that suits you, and if your economics require that, that’s fine by me. But you being here tonight means you do get to see hopefully tantalizing clips of it that make you want to see more, but especially that hopefully guide our discussion. What I will try to convey in the limited time I have, which is a portrait of – I think what we have in the United States, we often hear this concept in all kinds of areas of life: something taken to its logical extreme. I think what you see in America is the notion of severe drug sentencing and drug law enforcement as opposed to public health solutions – that has been taken to an illogical extreme. To give you a ridiculous example: as you may remember, Trayvon Martin died in Florida last year and after that, about three weeks www.chathamhouse.org 3 Transcript: Lessons from America’s War on Drugs later, in a less-known news story, a woman was fearing in Florida that her serially abusive husband might abuse her. So she took out a gun and fired it into the air, discharged it into the air, to frighten him. It turns out you get 20 years in jail for discharging a firearm in the state of Florida, so that was her sentence. Had she taken out the gun, pointed it at him and killed him, she would have gotten 15. So that’s how insane our legal structure has become in its frenzied, hysterical rush to devise all manner of mandatory minimum sentences to attach to all manner of activities, so that more and more people can go to prison and prove profitable to those who profit from our prison system. That’s not just private interests, that’s also just workers and politicians and an entire bureaucracy whose thrust has become so poisoned by those imperatives. So with that in mind, I’m going to show an opening clip. I thought about what to show at first and just in an act of shameless self-promotion I’m going to show not videos of my kids, although it’s almost that – I’m going to show the trailer for the movie, the theatrical and television trailer, which is essentially like watching a movie trailer in the theatre. But if I’ve done a good job, it’s supposed to make you want to watch a movie. So let’s watch the opening trailer of the film to give you a sense, and then we’ll start talking in greater substance. [Film Clip 1: Trailer] So that was an effort to encapsulate a two-hour-ish movie into two minutes. It does so in a manner that is sensational and provocative, and is intended to be so. I learned years ago that when you make trailers for movies – my movies tend to be very measured exercises in reasonable people disagreeing and contemplative arguments made and not a lot of strident posturing and over-the-top expressions. I do that for a lot of reasons: it’s respectful of the viewer; it’s respectful of the notion that life is complicated and solutions are very often not black and white. But it’s also clever if you want to please the critics, which are ultimately the middlemen between me and my intended audience. In order to win festivals and get critics to be happy, you play this very careful game of ‘hiding the lede’ in many ways in your movie.
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