Today is the broadcast of the series finale of one of my favorite shows, The Wire.
For those who don't know about the show (which seems to be most people), it's about Baltimore cops and the criminals--mostly drug gangs--that they pursue. But it speaks about far more substantial and enduring themes: poverty, racism, undereducation, corruption, government neglect, and the futility of the war on drugs.
To mark the occasion, I'd like to talk a little bit about the costs of the war on drugs, and what one of our major presidential candidates has said about it.
Unlike other cop shows, The Wire doesn't take the side of the cops against the criminals, instead presenting both sides in full detail.
We see that the cops are underfunded and rife with brutal thugs, incompetent drunks, and ambitious brownnosers. The police commanders are indifferent to any sort of police work besides routine arrests of drug users that do nothing to stem the constantly rising tide of crime.
We see that the drug gangs are highly organized, well-funded, and so entrenched in the poorer regions of the city that only a systematic, prolonged police investigation, by a unit devoted to the task, could possibly make any headway against them.
Eventually this unit is formed, and pushes and pries its way into the world of the Baltimore streets. And in the process we see how the logic of the war on drugs plays out in real life. How poverty and undereducation and neglect inexorably force decent, intelligent young people into the brutal day-to-day wars of the drug trade, how insulated the cunning, wealthy drug lords at the top are from any meaningful action against them, how the constant wave of police arrests and imprisonments does nothing but to destroy the lives of the young, poor, mostly black men who have little choice but to work as drug dealers.
No summary could do this show justice. Omar, McNulty, Daniels, D'Angelo, Stringer Bell--all of these characters are too rich, too alive to be captured in words. The stories are too complex and marvelous to describe. All I can say is, you gotta watch the show.
But most TV shows, no matter how thoughtful or critically lauded, have little to do with presidential politics. So what does The Wire have to do with any of this?
It's Barack Obama's favorite show.
Michael Kostroff, an actor who was in town to volunteer for Obama and had a chance to meet him, told the Sun that Obama’s favorite TV show is his own: HBO’s “The Wire,” which chronicles Baltimore’s violent drug culture and the police who quixotically try to stop it.
Why would Barack Obama, respectable US Senator and presidential candidate, pick this little-known show as his favorite? And what, if anything, does that say about what he might do about the drug war as president?
In a recent article, the creators of The Wire have spoken more explicitly about what they had hoped to convey in the show:
If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?...
Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.
The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.
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.
In 2005 we spent 45 billion dollars domestically, all told, on the War on Drugs. For comparison, about 120 billion dollars was spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same year. So in 2005, fighting illegal drugs cost about three-eighths of what it took to fight two wars in the Middle East.
What does Senator Obama think of all this? He has admitted using both marijuana and cocaine in his youth. He has, in the past, spoken out strongly against the war on drugs, coming out in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana:
But recently he has become more ambiguous, at one point hesitantly indicating that he might oppose decriminalization, although he now says he has always supported the decriminalization of marijuana.
In any case, it isn't any war on pot that's turning inner cities into war zones and balkanizing entire generations of poor black men. It's the war on cocaine and heroin and meth--hard drugs--that's doing all that. And Obama's response to the larger question of the drug war is entirely standard:
"I'm not interested in legalizing drugs," Obama said. "But what I am interested in is putting more of an emphasis on the public health approach to drugs and less on the incarceration approach to drugs."
He said there should be more programs to keep young people from using drugs. And he said first-time offenders should be given help to overcome their drug use instead of being locked up at taxpayer expense.
This is, of course, no different from what everyone always says.
So I ask Barack Obama: Senator, you are an intelligent, decent man. You cannot possibly be blind to the larger message of The Wire. So my question is this: As president, what exactly do you plan to do about the war on drugs? How will you answer the argument made by the creators of The Wire?
And I ask the same question to everyone who loved the show. Now that The Wire has ended, and we've had time to think about what it said, what do you think should be done about the war on drugs?
So far, the players have changed, but the game remains the same. Can we change the game?