Research Paper "The House I Live In"

Intercultural Research Paper: History and Theory The House I Live In by Eugene Jarecki is a documentary film about the war on drugs in the United States. It raises many contemporary intercultural concerns about the issue, but first it would be important to explain what cultural groups it highlights. We would first think about diving the war on drugs between drug users and law enforcement, but after watching this movie we can tell that there is a real intercultural issue amongst drug users and prisoners incarcerated for drugs. Indeed, we learn in the movie and its website that “even though White and Black people use drugs at approximately equal rates, Black people are 10.1 times more likely to be sent to prison for drug offenses. Today, Black Americans represent 56% of those incarcerated for drug crimes, even though they comprise only 13% of the U.S. Population”.
Michelle Alexander, author, accentuates this fact by saying that “there are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began”.
This clearly means the war on drugs targets more Black Americans than White people and raises many questions on its reason. Racism? Stereotypes? Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs Brown answered this issue in their book By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race by stating that “By artificially reducing both aggregate and racially specific unemployment rates, mass incarceration makes it easier for the majority culture to continue to ignore the urban ghettoes that live on beneath official rhetoric about opportunity being generated by free markets. It facilitates the elimination of honest discussion of America 's deep and inseparably linked inequalities of race and class from the nation 's public discourse. It encourages and enables a new, subtler racism in an age when open, public displays of bigotry have been discredited. Relying heavily on longstanding American opportunity myths and standard class ideology, this new racism blames inner-city minorities for their own failure to match white performance in a supposedly now free, meritorious, and color-blind society. Whites who believe, thanks partly to the decline of explicit public racism, that racial barriers have been lifted in the United States think that people of color who do not succeed fall short because of choices they made and/or because of inherent cultural or even biological limitations”. Mike Carpenter, security guard in an Oklahoma prison, adds in the movie that “every society needs an enemy to raise its economy” by telling us that communities’ and towns’ economies depend on prisons, and compare the actual ostracism going on in the country with Germany’s Hitler years in the 1930’s when its economy was rising and Jewish and homosexual people, amongst others, were marginalized from society. This theme of the movie is also surrounded by another topic: Are the prison sentences for drug use exaggerated in the United States? Now that Washington and Colorado have legalized the recreational use of marijuana in their States, the movie asks us if the sentences in other States where the drug is illegal are not too harsh. Indeed, in Texas, according to the website www.drugpossessionlaws.com, marijuana possession of under 2oz can cause a maximum penalty of 180 days in jail. If being in possession of more than this amount, penalties can reach up to 20 years in prison with fines of up to $10,000.00. More and more people are bringing this topic to the table, and many believe like TV Personality Adam Carolla that “unless you harm somebody else or put them in jeopardy… do whatever you want. You want to get really high and go drive, speed through a neighborhood, then we have a problem”. Indeed, prisoners incarcerated for drug use share the same prisons as murderers and rapists, and to many people, this issue is one of the biggest contemporary discussion topic linked to the war on drugs. Concerning historical relevance, various intercultural histories are present in the film, mostly concerning drug use between different races. For example, we learn that in the late 1800s, cocaine was popular inside Black American communities. Indeed, Dockers in New Orleans used it to enable them to work harder and for longer hours. It also gained popularity shortly after amongst southern plantation workers. In 1901, he Senate adopts a resolution which forbids the sale by American traders of opium and alcohol to “aboriginal tribes and uncivilized races”. As a result, since these two drugs were banned to the black community, cocaine was one of the few drug left. Dr. Hamilton Wright even reported that American contractors gave cocaine to their black employees to make them more productive. In the 1980’s, in order to make more profits, drug dealers convert powder cocaine into crack, which is a solid smokeable alternative. Today, less than a quarter of crack users are black and 72% are white or Hispanic. The history of cocaine in the United States can be related to the racial issue discussed in the first paragraph because 90% users of crack cocaine in prisons are black.
As for Marijuana, we learn that its recreational use began in the country in the last century, with the arrival of Mexican immigrants looking for work in the southwest. In order to find an excuse for their racist hatred of Mexicans, some white Americans began spreading rumors that Marijuana drove these immigrants crazy and turned them into murderers. These stereotypes would last for decades, and we can define the attitude of those white Americans by being nativistic, which means being extremely patriotic to the point of being anti-immigrant. It can be related with chapter 1 of the textbook about relationships with new immigrants (absent from the film): “Relationships between residents and immigrants—between old-timers and newcomers—have often been filled with tension and conflict. In the 19th century, Native Americans sometimes were caught in the middle of European rivalries. During the War of 1812, for example, Indian allies of the British were severely punished by the United States when the war ended. In 1832, the U.S. Congress recognized the Indian nations’ right to self-government, but in 1871, a congressional act prohibited treaties between the U.S. government and Indian tribes. In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, terminating Native Americans’ special relationship with the U.S. government and paving the way for their removal from their homelands.” (Page 11).
Another history, absent from the film though, is how MDMA, otherwise known as Molly or Ecstasy, was used in different cultures through history. Indeed, according to an interview with Dr Alexander Shulgin, himself administrated MDMA during the 1970s in the United States to his patients as a therapeutic product in order to give them insight into their problems and reduce their psychological defenses. Nowadays, it is called the “rave drug” and is mainly used amongst teens at rave parties and is very characteristic to the electronic dance music scene and culture. Concerning the political histories of the cultural interactions found in the movie, we can highlight the fact that in June 1971, President Nixon, because of drugs becoming the symbol of rebellion and political dissent, started a “war on drugs” by increasing the presence of federal drug control agencies and by implementing stronger sentences and new laws against drug possession, like the Rockefeller Drug Law in 1973 which sentences 15 years to life for nonviolent drug offenses.
As for the intellectual history, contrast with President Nixon can be made with intellectual figures like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates who where active users of LSD, Sigmund Freund with cocaine, and Carl Sagan with marijuana.
For the social part, we can put in evidence the fact that drugs are related to social structures. Indeed, like Catherine Spooner and Kate Hetherington from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Center of the University of New South Wales in Sydney say, “social categories such as class, gender and race can influence access to resources, exposure to marginalization, roles and expectations. As a result, health outcomes, drug use and drug outcomes are influenced by social category. For example, people from low socio-economic classes have poorer health and are more likely to use tobacco, to drink alcohol in a high-risk manner and to use illicit drugs”.
To finish, national histories would be figures like Will Smith, Mark Wahlberg, Scarlett Johansson, and CNN’s TJ Holmes, amongst others, who asked Obama to end the war on drugs. Regarding the war on drugs, lots of debates surround this theme. One of them calls into question if it is really working. Indeed, even though we have seen how drugs have destroyed lives and families in the film, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion in the past 40 years on the war of drugs, and has made 45 million arrests linked to it. Even though the US only represents 5% of the world’s population, its inmates represent 25% of all the prisoners in the world, with 2,3 million Americans incarcerated, whom 500.000 for drug offenses. As drugs are getting cheaper and more affordable, the fact that black Americans are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses even though they use drugs at equal rates, the fact that it costs an average of $78.95 per day to keep an inmate locked up (more than 20 times the cost of a day on probation), and all the extravagant expenses made by the government, some intellectual and national figures mentioned above advocating individual freedom are the spokesmen of the anti-drug war movement going on since the 2000s. Today the movement leans more towards drug prevention supporting Richard Branson citation: “What we need to do is to treat drugs as a health problem, not as a criminal problem”.

If we had to analyze the film through a research perspective, the critical approach would probably be the most appropriate because the movie emphasizes the fact that there are clearly different economic and political forces shown in the movie being the result of power struggles (drug users VS police; politicians in favor/disfavor of legalization etc.). Indeed, the research goal of the movie is to change our behavior on the war on drugs because according to the film it has failed. It teaches us that cultural interactions rely on power and that we can learn how to resist those forces of power and oppression. Many intercultural theories and terminologies can be applied to this film. A link can be made with the principle of uncertainty avoidance (chapter 3, page 104), which defines “the degree to which people who feel threatened by ambiguous situations respond by avoiding them or trying to establish more structure to compensate for the uncertainty. Societies that have a weak uncertainty avoidance orientation (the United States) prefer to limit rules, accept dissent, and take risks.” Indeed, I have noticed that drugs are more popular inside the US population than in countries with a strong uncertainty avoidance orientation like Asian countries because Americans are more willing to take risks and break the rules. A link can also be made with the notion of power in intercultural interactions (chapter 4, page 133), stating, “We are not equal in our intercultural encounters”. In the movie, we can clearly see how there are two different cultural groups with their own positions. To finish, the movie shows us how demographics (chapter 1, page 6) play an important role in the drug of war and drug use in general. Indeed, we have learned that some drugs are more or less popular depending on the “race, ethnicity, age, sex and income” of the user (Methamphetamine is more popular amongst unemployed blue collars for example), and that the drug of war is targeting the black population more than the white one. The House I Live In and the theories linked to it can be applied on a personal level and inform our current intercultural interactions. In fact, we notice that society depends on intercultural interactions, which are always present in our daily lives. I am now more aware of the notion of power surrounding us, responsible for our different intercultural encounters. I can tell, after watching this movie and reading the theories from the book, that we are all different and that quality intercultural communication is vital nowadays to succeed living and respecting each other. This movie makes us question ourselves on the results and success of the war on drugs going on in the United States. It makes us realize, through a critical perspective, that it has not been very successful neither fair. Indeed, the film questions social justice via examples of how the war on drugs is discriminatory and targets certain groups of people amongst others, and on how it is a failure economically and morally. It speaks to how we need to adapt our intercultural communication amongst us, accusing a system of being unfair, and by showing us that good communication between people and cultures can be achieved if there is mutual respect and tolerance, even though “every society needs an enemy”.

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Works Cited
Catherine Spooner and Kate Hetherington, “Social Determinants of Drug Use”. Web. 2004. http://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/ndarc/resources/TR.228.pdf Interview with Dr. Alexander Shulgin, “Surfing the Rave:Ecstasy”, Web. http://www.mdma.net/alexander-shulgin/mdma.html National Advancement for the Advancement of Colored People. “Criminal justice fact sheet”. http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet Paul Street. “Race, Prison, and Poverty: The Race To Incarcerate In The Age of Correctional
Keynesianism”. History is a Weapon. Web. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/streeracpripov.html
State Drug Possession Laws and Penalties. “Drug Possession Laws”. Web. http://www.drugpossessionlaws.com

Cited: Catherine Spooner and Kate Hetherington, “Social Determinants of Drug Use”. Web. 2004. http://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/ndarc/resources/TR.228.pdf