The Dirty War

How much would you be willing to do for your children? Would you give up a good career to be a stay-at-home parent? Go into debt for college? Donate a kidney? How about joining a drug cartel to keep your child out of prison?

Based on a true story, Snitch offers an inside look at the drug war, and what we see isn’t pretty. A system that forces people to lie, snitch, and entrap their friends in order to avoid severe jail time is nothing to be proud of. According to the film, the US has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world, with 25% of all prisoners worldwide residing behind our bars.

Jason Collins (Rafi Gavron) is a typical high school senior. He has a girlfriend, he’s applying for college, and he’s trying to fit in. When his best friend Craig (James Allen McCune) skypes from overseas and asks him to accept a FedEx package, Jason is torn between pleasing his friend and not wanting to get involved in something so risky. Mailing drugs from foreign countries has become the transportation of choice since airport security became more stringent. Jason doesn’t agree, but the next day, the package arrives anyway — along with a federal tracking device and about a dozen armed DEA agents. It turns out that Craig was caught mailing the drugs, and in order to get a reduction in his mandatory sentence, he said that Jason was planning to distribute the drugs.

Now Jason is offered the same deal. He faces a mandatory ten years in prison, but if he will snitch on someone else, his sentence will be reduced to two years. Shorter if he fingers someone big. The only problem is, Jason is a good kid. He doesn’t do drugs. The only person he knows who does drugs is Craig, and the feds already have Craig.

“Get someone to sell to you, and we’ll give them the same offer,” the feds tell him. “That’s the way it works.” Mandatory sentencing is not designed for punishment or rehabilitation of the offender; it’s not even designed to get users off the streets. It’s designed to get offenders to snitch. “That’s how we work our way to the top,” the feds tell them. Snitches “pay it forward” until a big one gets caught.

Jason’s parents are desperate to get their son out of this situation. “Take the deal!” they tell him.

“I can’t set someone up!” Jason says. He’s scared, but he’s adamant. “You’re asking me to do this to someone else! I won’t do it.” You gotta admire that. Jason is, as I said, a good kid. But drug enforcement officers are anything but good. The so-called war on drugs is all about entrapment and deceit.

Jason’s dad, John Matthews (Dwayne Johnson) is a successful business owner of a construction company. He has some connections on the local police force and he knows a couple of judges. But it doesn’t do him any good. The trouble with federalmandatory sentencing laws is that they are mandatory. Local judges have no authority to use judgment. Only the feds can offer a deal, and deals are only made to snitches.

US Attorney Joanne Keegan (Susan Sarandon) has no problem with the ethics of turning people into snitches. “I believe in the mandatory minimums,” she says. “We’re fighting a war on drugs, and the violence they cause.” But the violence is caused by the illegality of the drugs, not the drugs themselves. If drugs were legalized, most of the crime and violence associated with them would go away.

This point is made subtly early in the film, when Jason is first arrested. His mother (Melina Kanakaredes) waits outside, puffing on a cigarette. When John goes home, he pours himself a scotch. These are drugs too, but they are legal. Consequently, their use doesn’t lead to violent crimes and turf warfare. Yes, there are externalities that merit certain regulations; you have the right to smoke and drink whatever you want, as long as you avoid violating another person's reasonable right to privacy and safety. Reasonable regulation leads to reasonable use. John drinks a scotch in the evening, but when he goes to work the next day, he drives an 18-wheeler and runs a successful business.

Eventually John offers himself as the snitch in the place of his son. Keegan agrees that if he will go undercover and catch a drug dealer — any drug dealer! — she will reduce Jason’s sentence to one year. From this moment forward the film becomes what we expect from “The Rock” (Dwayne Johnson’s screen name and WWE moniker before he had children and started making family-friendly films like Tooth Fairy [2010] and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island [2012]), with plenty of bulging muscles, steely glares, blazing guns, car chases, and crashes.

The film tries to maintain John’s heroic stature by portraying “his” drug dealers as dirty, vindictive, dangerous criminals. But he needs an introduction to that underworld, and toget it he sets up an ex-con who works for him. He does the very thing that his son refused to do. There is just no way to stay clean in the dirty business of the war against drugs.

Snitch is intense and exciting, but it’s not a run-of-the-mill action film. It is an important film about how the federal government is destroying lives in its relentless and futile attempt to stop the use of illegal drugs. Drug laws destroy lives. The drug war destroys lives. It’s time we end the war and recognize that drug abuse is a medical problem, not a legal problem.