American Drug War: The Last White Hope (2007)
Sacred Cow Productions

Description

The War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly war in American history, the question has become, how much more can the country endure? Inspired by the death of four family members from "legal drugs" Texas filmmaker Kevin Booth sets out to discover why the Drug War has become such a big failure. Three and a half years in the making the film follows gang members, former DEA agents, CIA officers, narcotics officers, judges, politicians, prisoners and celebrities. Most notably the film befriends Freeway Ricky Ross; the man many accuse for starting the Crack epidemic, who after being arrested discovered that his cocaine source had been working for the CIA. American Drug War shows how money, power and greed have corrupted not just dope fiends but an entire government. More importantly, it shows what can be done about it.

Tags

War on drugs

Collected reviews and ratings

9.0 Amazon user reviews

The subject of America's love for mind-altering substances (legal and illegal) is broad and deep enough to provide material for a dozen documentaries, but Kevin Booth does an excellent job of putting together a coherent two-hour film that takes on several aspects of the drug war.
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8.8 Austin Chronicle | Josh Rosenblatt

The film is a two-hour trip through the looking glass of American drug policy, taking viewers from the crack-strewn streets of Los Angeles to the meth-fueled prisons of Arizona, from the halls of Congress to Booth's own family kitchen, in an effort to make sense of a national drug policy that manages to cost $60 billion a year and imprison 1 million nonviolent offenders yet has no discernible effect on the sale or use of drugs.
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