The House I Live In Analysis

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The House I Live In is a video documentary on the war on drugs. It discusses how the U.S. jails houses 25% of the world incarcerated but only makes up for 5% of the world’s total population. We are seeing more colored Americans in correction, prison, and parole facilities then there were colored people enslaved. Along with having more inmates, the United States has the largest drug problem in the world. The movies reports that the U.S. citizens, combined, has spent between 10 and 16 billion dollars on illegal drugs each year in the past decade. In the 1950’s, narcotic groups would target blacks even though whites are the biggest users. With the inner cities having little to no resources it was easier for the police to arrest African Americans and lock them up. Back in the 1970’s, President Nixon declared “drug abuse” to be public enemy number one and had new polices put in place. However, the War on Drugs only seemed to make things worse. It created a moral panic that had everyone worried about children using all kinds of drugs. This lead to the DEA making a schedule of drugs, listing and arranging drugs on a list from one to five. Schedule one drugs are those serving …show more content…
A big problem is because of the drug scheduling, the DEA back in the 70’ thought that marijuana had no medical purpose and was a gate was drug to other schedule one drugs. Today, we are seeing a chance to how we view the use of marijuana. While it is still illegal some states are going against the federal government making recreational use of marijuana legal, mean people are free to use and sale it. This is because after more research and technology has been developed since the 70’s, we are finding medical use for marijuana and that it is not a gate way drug. What we are not seeing is new laws and new scheduling of drugs. This is all causing incarceration rates to continue to go

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