Requiem for Hamsterdam: The Wire Producers on America’s Drug War
by Brendon Carr
HBO’s The Wire is one of those only-on-cable dramas that make pay television compelling and the metastasizing spread of CSI on free-to-air TV all that more depressing.
Violent and foulmouthed, yet incredibly smart, The Wire chronicles crime—mostly the drug war—in the bleak collapsed cityscape of Baltimore. Creators Ed Burns and David Simon are the bards of Balmer, telling its stories from the perspective of the po-lice first on the late, great Homicide: Life on the Street on NBC, then to HBO for The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood and finally The Wire.
This week HBO will air the 10th and final episode of the fifth and final season of The Wire. Since good television touches the soul, the passing of any show like The Wire merits a mention in our newspapers and magazines of record. And so Time carries an essay from Burns and Simon and their co-producers Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos and Richard Price that mirrors my own feelings on the drug war:
What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we’ve been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.
A wonderful essay; well worth your time to read. See also Radey Balko’s interview of Ed Burns—“Someone Has to Start Wondering What the F is Going On”—at Reason Online.
As the writers mention in their Timeessay, last week we were treated to the news that 1 out of 100 Americans (and one out of 15 black Americans) is in prison—a shocking statistic. And so much of it is due to the senseless drug war. When I was in law school, I had a friend who was a year ahead of me—and who I knew was a recreational marijuana user—interviewing for a job with the Justice Department.
He spent a few days before the scheduled interview, which apparently included a urine test for drug use, scrambling to find an alchemist or fake-weiner vendor to help him evade detection—so that he could go into the machine that was locking up poor blacks on life sentences for the very same behavior! It was shockingly wrong.
Here on Korea Law Blog and elsewhere on Korea-related blogs, I’m hard on the potheads because I think they’re dumb for (i) smoking weed, which is something I wouldn’t do myself; (ii) smoking weed here in Korea where the authorities are hard after weed-smokers (especially foreign ones); and (iii) crying about it when the inevitable denouement arrives. But ultimately, I’m a libertarian: For the reasons articulated so eloquently in the Time essay, for America I think drugs ought to be legalized.
For those of us in Korea, I haven’t noted Korean cable channels carrying The Wire. But it’s available on DVD and BitTorrent.
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I just finished watching episode 10, the last episode (thank you Pirate Bay), which I enjoyed very much. Like most people, I was a little let down by season 5, although episodes 8 and 9 were really excellent.
No opinions about Burns and Simon’s Time essay, where they for juries to acquit all (non-violent) drug offenders? No problems with that, from a legal-guy standpoint?
Considering all the dreck out there on Korean cable TV, I find it incredible that not one channel has even tried to show THE WIRE. We get NIP/TUCK regularly, and plenty of other crappy shows, but not much from HBO. I cannot recall Catch On showing season six of SOPRANOS at all. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is shown one a year or so on Fox TV. Bizarre.
Amen brother!
Restricted government, free market, no more overseas intervention, no more Federal Reserve!
Gold standard, humble foreign policy, national sovereignty, and gradual withdrawal from Social Services that are best provided by the local and state governments.
Sounds as if you may be more ready to vote for Ron Paul than I am.
It’ll take time to remind people of the Constitution and that we should follow it. Perhaps it will take a depression or a catastrophe to have the pendulum swing back. Machiavelli seems prophetic when he talked about a city’s swing from dictatorship to democracy and back.
I haven’t seen beyond the first few episodes of season 4 - I think it was - where they went into the schools on the Wire.
The creator of the Wire knows the police and crime. I was only a cop for a year in Savannah, but it was like watching a documentary. I wasn’t surprised at all when I went to read up on the Wire people to find he had been a crime reporter in Baltimore for so long.
I did have one big bone to pick with the show - and I pick it with Brendon too on the legalization issue:
One glaring, glaring hole in The Wire - at least up to what I had seen through part of season 4 - was the crime related to drugs that wasn’t gang-related....
The show spent a ton of time depicting the violence of the war to control the drugs and against the drugs.
It did much less with the devastated lives of the addicts.
And it did nothing with the crime and crime’s influence related to the money the addicts need to feed the addiction.
I don’t see how legalizing drugs is going to stop that destruction of our societies.
Legalization might cut down on drug gangs fighting each other. It will cut down on the number of people arrested for possession.
But crack and other drugs are already so cheap, and so addictive, and ultimately so expensive, I don’t see legalization cutting down on the stealing, car jacking, prostitution, and many other ways addicts get the money to feed the addiction.
And so I don’t see legalization lessening the hardship of the crime victims or the families of the addicts (who are often the victims of the crimes too)…
usinkorea,
There probably is no answer to the non-violent drug-related crime. We’re not going to be able to completely eradicate drugs from American society, so we’re left having to look for harm reduction.
If you want to see the drug addict’s experience, check out The Corner. Harrowing stuff.
This maybe off topic
But why is one addiction more tolerated than the other example, Alcoholism, in that the person is given more of a chance than a drug addict.
It’s not off topic at all, Bones. Your question is a variant on the question I have: Why are suburban kids who use and sell cocaine given so many more chances than urban kids who use and sell crack? The black kids all seem to end up in prison. Why does Jay Leno make wink-wink, nudge-nudge jokes about marijuana use on the Tonight Show, while federal agents kick down doors and shoot up families suspected of growing pot?
I don’t use drugs, and don’t really like alcohol. I think most of the people who use that stuff—especially drugs, but also alcohol—are dopes. Addiction is mainly a function of weak character, as well as physical dependency, which is why I look down on addicts. But do I think our law-enforcement efforts would be better spent another way. Harassing citizens for being weak is not a function for the government.
USINKOREA:
As Brendon said, we’ll never eliminate drugs, addiction or 100% of drug-related crime. That said, I wonder if, by legalizing (and perhaps regulating) drugs, society couldn’t move toward treating addiction like the medical condition it is, rather than as a crime.
Criminalization of drugs has clearly not solved the problem of addiction - and it has almost certainly exacerbated crime and other social ills - so why not try something new instead of continuing down the same path, expecting different results?
I’d have to agree with Aaron. I think by legalizing the use of drugs, and treating it like a medical condition, will help to not only to not only reduce the people who are currently using it, and help them get treatment, but also help as a preventative. Not to mention that it will take the incentive away from the dealers, thus reducing the drugs that are actually going into the system.