The war on drugs receives a facetious film dissection
Getting up to your neck in the drug war is as easy as A-B-C in Matthew Cooke’s documentary “How to Make Money Selling Drugs.” The film’s facetious instructional conceit allows it both to avoid the hand-wringing tone of many similar docs and to aim its message at the young viewers it hopes to galvanize. Offering well chosen interviewees at nearly every level of “the game,” the film might connect with those viewers on small screens, even if it holds few revelations for moviegoers who have seen its more grown-up cinematic cousins.
Though the title suggests a 1970s self-help paperback, Cooke’s film treats the subject more like a video game, coaching viewers on the perils and payoffs of each “level” of involvement, from on-the-corner pawn to cartel chief. (Old-school game sound effects underline the joke.) Cooke uses been-there interviews with former dealers who went on to pop stardom (50 Cent) and with higher-ups whose adventures could fuel feature biopics (Freeway Rick Ross, who claims at one point that he was making a million dollars per day). Thus the film suggests a seductive if challenging path from selling the occasional joint to shipping kilos of cocaine through Miami.
The stories are familiar from decades of film and TV fictionalizations; in fact, Cooke uses multiple clips from HBO’s “The Wire” to make his points. (Creator David Simon pops up late in the film to lament the way that street-level policing has been weakened by federal policymaking.) But they’re engagingly presented in first-person fashion, with no screenwriter’s pen intervening between viewers and the men who lived these stories. (With one or two exceptions, like Detroit interviewee called Mister X, they’ve left drug dealing behind.)
In his path up the food chain, Cooke takes a lengthy time-out to look at a “secret level”: One of the best ways to make money from drugs, he reveals, is to be on the side of law enforcement. The scandalous stuff here, which revolves around forfeiture laws, mandatory-minimum sentencing and U.S. incarceration rates, has been well investigated elsewhere, but may be news to some of this film’s viewers; it also pairs well with the testimony of Barry Cooper, the onetime cop whose Road-to-Damascus conversion turned him into a leading opponent of the drug war.
The film’s point of view gets a bit muddled toward the end, as it combines a critique of deadly but legal drugs tobacco and alcohol with visions of a post-Prohibition society. Proposing realistic solutions, one concludes, is a good deal more difficult than finding clever new ways of saying “The system is broken.”