the documentary has been well received. among the review aggregators, rotten tomatoes gave it 95% based on 55 reviews and metacritic gave it 77/100 based on 24 reviews. roger ebert says "the house i live in" "makes a shattering case against the war on drugs." peter bradshaw reviewed the film for "the guardian" and summed it up as an "angry and personal attack on america's war on drugs [that] contends it is a grotesquely wasteful public-works scheme".