A documentary by Eugene Jarecki. Unrated. Opens Friday, March 1, at the Vancity Theatre

The United States has roughly seven percent of the world’s people yet contains a quarter of its incarcerated population, making it “the jailingest country on Earth”, according to David Simon. Simon, the TV maven who created such crime-ridden shows as The Wire and Treme, figures prominently among experts—both street-level and above—discussing the abject failure of America’s so-called war on drugs.

As in the “war on terror” and the better-intentioned “war on poverty”—touched upon in director Eugene Jarecki’s previous documentaries, including Why We Fight, Freakonomics, and The Trials of Henry Kissinger—these abstraction-filled battles quickly turned into boondoggles enriching the few at the expense of the many.

Here, a tough-on-crime initiative invented by Richard Nixon to distract the nation from its Vietnam crisis (and his own criminal inclinations) has been further entrenched by every president since to ensure that far more pot smokers than murderers and Wall Street crooks end up in the hoosegow.

How does this work? With figures supported by the many judges, criminologists, narcotics specialists, and beat cops whom the director interviews, it’s simply easier and more financially rewarding to nab petty users and dealers than to go after serious felons. Where this turns particularly ominous is in the singling out of the black population—which consumes drugs at the same rate as anyone else—for most of the punishment. And building for-profit private prisons in predominantly white areas is one of the few remaining growth industries.

Jarecki’s attempts to personalize this, through a lifelong relationship with his family’s black housekeeper (who lost family members to the war on drugs), is perhaps less effective. But supported by sharp archival footage, he makes the case that the “land of the free” has a long-standing history of demonizing minorities, starting with targeting their vices and ending with—well, it has no end, does it?