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According to ongoing discussions with Obama aides and associates, if the president wins a second term, he plans to tackle another American war that has so far been successful only in perpetuating more misery: the four decades of The Drug War.

Don’t expect miracles. There is very little the president can do by himself. And pot-smokers shouldn’t expect the president to come out in favor of legalizing marijuana. But from his days as a state senator in Illinois, Obama has considered the Drug War to be a failure, a conflict that has exacerbated the problem of drug abuse, devastated entire communities, changed policing practices for the worse, and has led to a generation of young children, disproportionately black and minority, to grow up in dislocated homes, or in none at all.

It is hard to write about the Drug War without getting preachy, in part because it remains so polarizing. This ought not be so. As a new documentary, The House I Live In, from filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, makes clear, a consensus is emerging among academics, police officers, lawyers, and even some politicians about what not to do.

The film debuted in Los Angeles the last night of the festival, right next to the theatre were the male striptease tentpole Magic Mike was premiering, and so it won’t get the attention from the press that it deserves. It did, however, win the Grand Jury citation at Sundance.

The House I Live In doesn’t break new ground. But it puts together 40 years of history, politics and sociology in a concise and compelling way. If you’re prepared to believe that the cycle of drug abuse that plagued the black community in the 1980s and is currently sweeping across poor white America now is the fault of the low-level dealers and the users themselves, then you won’t like Jarecki’s point of view. For him, the decision to sell drugs is a starting point.

He wants to know why it has become so common, so uncontroversial, so startlingly consequence-free. His answer is that everyone profits from it. The Drug War is ongoing because it has been successful for everyone but those most affected by it. Politicians have a useful and cyclic scapegoat to prove their crime bona fides. ("If you are a causal drug user, you are an accomplice to murder," Ronald Reagan once said.)

The corrections industry has become a billion dollar business. Through asset forfeiture laws, police departments large and small can buy expensive new toys and keep cops on the street. And Americans have a vehicle to control their exposure to those elements of society that seem to threaten their economic interests the most.

The historian Richard Miller, who usually writes about Abraham Lincoln, describes for viewers how drug laws in American history were created almost nakedly to marginalize disfavored groups. When Chinese immigrants began to crowd out jobs for white people in California, opium consumption suddenly became a crime. Hemp was legal and consumed in a variety of forms until it became a way to reduce economic competition from Mexicans. Cocaine, notoriously, was consumed in polite society throughout the century, but was not the subject of police attention until blacks migrated North to escape the Jim Crowified South. The 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine was the most obvious manifestation of how different blacks and whites were treated.

When President Obama recently signed a law reducing the disparity to 18 to 1, it was considered a reform, even though the two forms of cocaine are still pretty much the same goddamned thing.