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Is a Jay Z and Bernie Sanders Collab in Our Future?

Don't sleep, Bernie got barz!

Jay Z recently collaborated with the New York Times on a video essay titled, "The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail." The essay highlighted the inconsistencies and ineffectiveness of the so-called war on drugs, which was best highlighted by the line, “The NYPD raided our Brooklyn neighborhoods while Manhattan bankers openly used coke with impunity.”

Well, Bernie Sanders, a champion of the lower and middle classes, took note. He retweeted Hov’s piece Thursday (September 15) and added the comment, “Jay Z is right: We have to end the war on drugs.”

In the Molly Crabapple-animated and Dream Hampton-co-produced video, Jay makes a lot of the same arguments and cites similar statics as Sanders did while he was on the campaign trail, including, “The war on drugs exploded the U.S. prison population, disproportionately locking away Black[s] and Latinos. Our prison population grew more than 900 percent. When the war on drugs began in 1971, our prison population was 200,000. Today, it is over 2 million.”

Bernie Sanders has previously claimed he supports moving marijuana off the classification of being a Schedule 1 drug. Statistically, there isn’t much proof that the war on drugs has actually curbed drug use.

Peep Bernie Sanders’s tweet in solidarity with Jay Z below.

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