The Idea Blog

And the writers/producers of the HBO program offer up a suggestion for how to end the “war on drugs.” With discernible outrage, Ed Burns, David Simon and others involved in bringing us (me?) The Wire offer up their renewed brand of civil disobedience in an article published in TIME this week (March 17, 2008).

“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 can we citizens do about it?

“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.”

To read the entire piece, here’s the link.