International Law

Requiem for Hamsterdam: The Wire Producers on America?s Drug War

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.

Full post as published by Korea Law Blog on March 09, 2008 (boomark / email).