The Wire creator David Simon eviscerates the dystopia creating war on drugs<\/a> by Ed Vulliamy in The Raw Story.<\/p>\nThe Text:<\/strong> David Simon surged into the American mainstream with a bleak vision of the devastation wrought by drugs on his home town of Baltimore \u2013 The Wire, hailed by many as the greatest television drama of all time. But what keeps him there is his apocalyptic and unrelenting heresy over the failed \u201cwar on drugs\u201d, the multibillion-dollar worldwide crusade launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971.<\/p>\nWhen Simon brought that heresy to London last week \u2013 to take part in a debate hosted by the Observer \u2013 he was inevitably asked about what reformers celebrate as recent \u201csuccesses\u201d \u2013 votes in Colorado and Washington to legalise marijuana.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m against it,\u201d Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. \u201cThe last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cI want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that\u2019s very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail,\u201d he continued, \u201cand getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do.\u201d<\/p>\n
If marijuana were exempted from the war on drugs, he insisted, \u201cit\u2019d be another 10 or 40 years of assigning people of colour to this dystopia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Simon joined two film directors for a discussion onstage: Eugene Jarecki, in whose movie The House I Live In \u2013 on the toll of America\u2019s war on drugs \u2013 he features prominently, and Rachel Seifert, whose Cocaine Unwrapped charts the drug\u2019s progress from blighted \u201cproducer\u201d countries to the addicts in Europe and the US.<\/p>\n
The occasion was staged by the Observer and chaired by its editor, John Mulholland, as part of its campaign to address the global drugs crisis.<\/p>\n
Simon took no prisoners. In his vision, the war on \u2013 and the curse of \u2013 drugs are inseparable from what he called, in his book, The Death of Working Class America, the de-industrialisation and ravaging of cities that were once the engine-rooms and, in Baltimore\u2019s case, the seaboard of an industrial superpower.<\/p>\n
The war is about the disposal of what Simon called, in his most unforgiving but cogent term, \u201cexcess Americans\u201d: once a labour force, but no longer of use to capitalism. He went so far as to call the war on drugs \u201ca holocaust in slow motion\u201d.<\/p>\n
Simon said he \u201cbegins with the assumption that drugs are bad\u201d, but also that the war on drugs has \u201calways proceeded along racial lines\u201d, since the banning of opium.<\/p>\n
It is waged \u201cnot against dangerous substances but against the poor, the excess Americans,\u201d he said, and with striking and subversive originality, posited the crisis in stark economic terms: \u201cWe do not need 10-12% of our population; they\u2019ve been abandoned. They don\u2019t have barbed wire around them, but they might as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a result, \u201cdrugs are the only industry left in places such as Baltimore and east St Louis\u201d \u2013 an industry that employs \u201cchildren, old people, people who\u2019ve been shooting drugs for 20 years, it doesn\u2019t matter. It\u2019s the only factory that\u2019s still open. The doors are open.\u201d<\/p>\n
While his co-panellists sipped their water, Simon poured himself another glass of red wine as he continued. A bull of a man, a presence in any room \u2013 even one as large as the packed theatre in the colonnaded heart of Britain\u2019s scientific establishment.<\/p>\n
\u201cCapitalism,\u201d Simon said, \u201chas tried to jail its way out of the problem\u201d with the result that \u201cthe prison industry has been given over to capitalism. If we need to get rid of these people, we might as well make some money out of getting rid of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jarecki, in a scathing portrayal of the American prison system in both his film and at Thursday\u2019s event, cited some statistics: \u201cWe have ravaged our poor communities,\u201d he said, some of which, African-American, counted \u201c4,000 per 100,000 in jail, as compared with an average dose of around 300?. Meanwhile, Simon said the police in some cities had \u201cbecome an army of occupation that sends brothers and fathers to jail\u201d.<\/p>\n
He described a logic to policing in Baltimore whereby \u201cstreet-rips\u201d in drug-infested areas make for easy arrests to achieve \u201ccost-efficient\u201d policing, while criminal activity other than drugs was ignored because prosecutions were laborious.<\/p>\n
Simon said he had seen a decrease in arrests for non-drug offences from 70-90% to 20-40%, while drug-related arrests increased on some beats from 5,000 to 30,000 because, as Jarecki put it, \u201cit\u2019s like shooting fish in a barrel\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo the drug war,\u201d concluded Simon, \u201cmakes the city unsafe.\u201d But has it worked? \u201cThe drugs in my city are more powerful, cheaper and more available than ever before,\u201d replied Simon.<\/p>\n
Simon said he had \u201cno faith in our political leadership to ever address the problem. There is no incentive to walk away from law and order as a political currency.\u201d He said change would come, if it does, from jurors simply \u201crefusing to send husbands, sons and fathers from their communities to jail \u2026 That is how prohibition [of alcohol] ended. They couldn\u2019t find 12 Americans who would send a 13th to jail for selling bathtub gin.\u201d<\/p>\n
Simon regarded \u201clegalisation\u201d of drugs as \u201ca word invented by advocates of the drug war to make the other side look goofy, saying \u2018everything should be legalised\u2019. The issue is: how do we get out of here? And I say: decriminalisation. As with other controlled substances \u2013 taxed and regulated.\u201d He later said he did not think change would come of any moral decision, but because \u201csomeone just figures out: this is costing too much money\u201d.<\/p>\n
From the audience, the Colombian ambassador to London, Mauricio Rodr\u00edguez, drew attention to his government\u2019s leadership of initiatives from Latin America to \u201ccompletely redraw\u201d a global strategy on drugs, with co-responsibility assumed by consuming countries, focusing on social and economic issues, and money laundering by banks. \u201cBasta!\u201d he said, \u201cthe Latin American countries have had enough.\u201d Such thinking had driven a recent report, which Rodr\u00edguez brandished, by the Organisation of American States, of which, he pointed out, the US is a member.<\/p>\n
Simon replied that America had fought \u201cproxy wars\u201d across the world for decades, and the war on drugs in Latin America was among them. On the carnage in neighbouring Mexico, he said: \u201cIf 40,000 Mexicans are dead, we don\u2019t give a damn as long as it stays that side of the border \u2013 turn northern Mexico into an abattoir, so long as it doesn\u2019t get to Tucson. If we can fight to the last Mexican, for a suburban American to send their kid safely to junior high school, we will.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Article: The Wire creator David Simon eviscerates the dystopia creating war on drugs by Ed Vulliamy in The Raw Story. The Text: David Simon surged into the American mainstream with a bleak vision of the devastation wrought by drugs on his home town of Baltimore \u2013 The Wire, hailed by many as the greatest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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