Pubdate: Wed, 26 Jun 2013
Source: Stranger, The (Seattle, WA)
Copyright: 2013 The Stranger
Contact:  http://www.thestranger.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2241
Author: Brendan Kiley

AN EDUCATIONAL THRILL RIDE

How to Make Money Selling Drugs Is Part Expose, Part Instruction Manual

Meet "Big John" Harriel Jr. As a boy, the family he was living with was
so poor, they sometimes ate lemons off the tree in their front yard.
When the lemons stopped growing, Harriel knew it was time for him to go
out, find work, and help put food on the table. So he got involved with
his neighborhood's going concern, one of the only reliable growth
industries in America: drugs. At the age of 15, he started making $100
an hour.

And meet Brian O'Dea, a top-level international smuggler who once got
a tip that the police were on their way to intercept a 50-ton shipment
of marijuana, so he whisked away his product and left the cops some
fresh-made doughnuts and coffee instead.

And meet Neill Franklin, a thoughtful and earnest police officer who
oversaw more than 17 drug task forces during his 33-year career before
he fully realized the racism and destructiveness of the laws he was so
successfully enforcing. After he retired, he became the executive
director of the pro-legalization/regulation nonprofit Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition.

These guys-and many others-are the real-life cast of How to Make Money
Selling Drugs, part satire, part expose, and part how-to guide about
one of the last rags-to-riches business opportunities in America.

Selling Drugs isn't another dreary-but-important documentary about
the self-destructiveness of the drug war. (Destructive to everyone,
that is, except the prison industry and the law-enforcement agencies
that get dump trucks full of taxpayer money to keep playing their
useless game of whack-a-mole.)Selling Drugs is, as director Matthew
Cooke said in an interview last week, "a thrill ride, a movie-movie"
that aims to bring long-established facts to a new audience.

Like millions of teenagers in the United States, Cooke experimented
with marijuana and had the vague notion that keeping it illegal was
stupid, but he didn't think much more about it until a college
microeconomics course. That was his road-to-Damascus moment. "My mouth
dropped open when I saw the numbers," he said, "and what this is doing
for the prison-industrial complex, and the people who are going to be
unemployed no matter what, who are basically being harvested to supply
cheap labor for prisons."

But that's not the kind of presentation that would have helped his
teenage self make the leap from "weed should totally be legal" to
"drug prohibition is a massive, not to mention racist, structural
problem that is ruining lives across the western hemisphere."

So he made Selling Drugs as a kind of video game with ascending
"levels," from small-time street slinger to international drug
kingpin, and populated by colorful characters. There are current and
former dealers, from a subsistence cocaine dealer in Detroit to
"Freeway" Rick Ross, who basically invented the Los Angeles crack
trade and was pulling down $1 million a day before he was 30. Cooke
also roped in celebrities: former drug dealer 50 Cent, recovering drug
addict Eminem, and Susan Sarandon, who advocates for people like
Hamedah Hasan, who was sentenced to the mandatory minimum of 27 years
because she happened to be at her cousin's house when the cousin was
arrested for drug activity. (Hasan is an iconic example of injustice
in drug sentencing: She received a longer sentence than the leaders of
the drug ring because she was so peripheral to the business that she
had no useful information to trade for a lighter sentence.)

Selling Drugs is important, and it covers a lot of ground, but it's
also slick and entertaining. Go see it, and bring along a friend who
might think "weed should totally be legal" but hasn't necessarily
thought through the drug war as a whole. Those kinds of friends are
the ones who need to see How to Make Money Selling Drugs. recommended
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MAP posted-by: Matt