To his immense credit, Jarecki is speaking up. He says his film is no advocacy piece but rather a movie "driven by real people's stories." But the advocacy is there, in virtually every scene. The "real people" Jarecki shows us are complex individuals, generators of sympathy and empathy, outrage and sorrow, sometimes all at the same time. And in that sense, if no other, they are powerful tribunes for the message he seeks to send: Drug crime is caused by drug addiction, drug addiction is a public health matter, and all of us pay in one manner or another for short-sighted policies that treat drug abuse as a matter for the criminal courts.

Jarecki contends that the "war on drugs" is more warlike than any of us are willing to believe and that it has been waged disproportionately for decades on America's poor. If every lawyer, judge, cop, prison guard, politician, policy maker, and economist in America saw this film, fewer families might be devastated by the "lock-em-up" approach to the problem. And fewer taxpayers would have to foot the bill. Here is my interview with him, conducted by telephone on December 23.

COHEN: Your work touched upon many different components of the failed war on drugs. If you had to choose two sentences to describe the film -- two thesis sentences -- what would they be?

JARECKI: Well, you described it as a failed war on drugs and I'm delighted to hear you refer to it that way. If there are two sentences that my film wants to communicate, it's that the war on drugs has failed and must be thrown on the ash heap of history as a kind of accident from which we must move on. The second sentence is that what was wrong with it from the start must be corrected -- namely, that it took a public health concern, drug abuse, and treated it instead as a criminal matter, and by doing so has made an explosion in our prison population of incarcerating the non-violent as through they were violent.

COHEN: The Holocaust. You went there. Can you share a little bit of your thinking into why you made that analogy toward the end of the film? I can imagine some folks, including people who generally are sympathetic to the movie's message, won't quite get the comparisons. Have you received any blowback?

JARECKI: Almost none, and I think it's because the framing of the message by David Simon, who created The Wire, and by Richard Lawrence Miller, the historian who drew his analogy from Raoul Hillberg's analysis of what went on in the Third Reich. All of them work with great surgery to ensure that they are not making some kind of clumsy, ham-fisted analogy that blurs the differences between discrete elements of history.



Anyone with a scalpel involved in that enterprise will find that there are discomforting patterns that mankind has engaged in, where we have seen groups persecuted by the larger society, often predicated on some habit of the theirs, or practice of theirs, or custom special to a group. As someone who comes out of the Holocaust experience, as the child of survivors, I take any analogy of the Holocaust with great seriousness. But if one is surgical and is learning from that horror that so impacted my family, then history is finally being the educator that it's supposed to be.