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March 06, 2008

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right."

The Wire just finished its final season; it was the weakest of the five, but better than 99% of the rest of television. Seasons 2-4 may have been the best television ever.

Though the show is about so much more, the writers had this to say about the "War on Drugs" in a recent Time Magazine editorial.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest.

| By Josiah Roe | 09:44 PM

Comments

I agree about everything you wrote. Seasons 2-4 were the best television and social analysis I'd ever seen for the medium. Season 1 was also fantastic, and season 5 was the least. But season 5 was also hard to watch because you knew, once McNulty started the serial killings, that it was going to end badly. I couldn't separate the emotional sickness I felt each episode, watching that thing become way bigger than McNulty intended, from the overall season. It clouded my judgement a little, but nonetheless, it was my least favorite season (which doesn't mean I disliked it in the least). Thanks for this Time article. I'm presenting a talk in a few weeks on drug prohibition and will likely steal some lines from this.

Posted by: scott cunningham at March 11, 2008 10:42 AM