Eugene Jarecki starts with Nannie Jeter, the woman who helped raise him, and traces how the drug war swallowed her family across three generations: a son lost to addiction, grandsons cycling through prison. From there the film widens into a cross-country account of the policy itself, built from interviews with police officers, judges, inmates, and dealers, along with historian and journalist David Simon, who argues the war on drugs has become a permanent, self-sustaining industry. Federal judge Mark Bennett appears on camera describing mandatory minimum sentences he is required to impose even when he thinks they are unjust. Jarecki traces the policy back to Nixon's 1971 declaration and follows it through decades of harsher sentencing laws, showing how enforcement has fallen hardest on poor and minority communities while the underlying drug use patterns barely shift. The film adds up the arrests, the prison population, and the money spent, and asks whether the country built a machine for punishing poverty rather than solving addiction.