The writer/director, who contributed to this hard-hitting documentary, on why US drugs policy has gone terribly wrong
On Baltimore… I was a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun for 13 years. I covered the drug war extensively. When I started in 1982, the federal prison population was about 550,000, and 35% were violent offenders. When I finished my run as a reporter 15 years later, it was approaching 2 million, and only 7% were violent offenders.'
In my city, Baltimore, we had a mayor, Martin O'Malley, who decided he was going to escalate the drug war. Zero tolerance was his mantra, and he put it out there: "Get everybody off the corners. Clear the corners." He was running for governor, so, for political reasons, he was basically trying to clear the street a year in advance of the election. We were filming The Wire in Baltimore at the time. And it got to the point that my African-American crew members and actors couldn't get back to their hotel without getting locked up, because they were driving while black. It was just presumed they were out there to cop drugs. So every now and then I'd have to go down and bail out my assistant director or one of my actors. Now, that was what was happening to people who were somewhat notable and had something to say to the cop. Can you imagine how many regular Baltimoreans went down to the city jail charged with nothing?
On the police… Nobody respects good police work more than me. As well as being a police reporter, my first book was about good police work. And there are a lot of detectives who I admire for their professionalism, for their craft, for their skill, for their nuance. The problem is that the drug war created an environment in which none of that was rewarded.
In a city like Baltimore, you can sit in your radio car and make a drug arrest without understanding or requiring probable cause [reasonable suspicion], without worrying about how you're going to testify in court without perjuring yourself, without learning how to use and not be used by an informant, without learning how to write a search and seizure warrant, without doing any of the requisite things that makes a good cop into a great cop, somebody that can solve a murder, a rape, a robbery, a burglary. These are crimes that require police work. A drug arrest does not require anything other than getting out of your radio car and jacking people up against the side of the liquor store.
The problem is that that cop that made that cheap drug arrest, he's going to get paid. He's going to get the hours of overtime for taking the drugs down to ECU [the evidence control unit]. He's going to get paid for processing the prisoner down at central booking. He's going to get paid for sitting back at his desk and writing the paperwork for a couple hours. Then the case is going to get called to court and a prosecutor's going to sign his overtime slip for two, three hours to show up for a case that's probably going to be stetted [dropped] because it's unconstitutional. And he's going to do that 40, 50, 60 times a month. So his base pay might end up being half of what he's actually paid as a police officer.
Meanwhile, nobody is learning the rudiments of police work that might make a patrolman into a good detective. In Baltimore, the clearance rates – our percentage of arrests for felonies – for rape, murder, robbery, auto theft, for the things that make a city unlivable – are half of what they once were.
Our drug arrest stats are twice what they once were. That makes a city unlivable. It creates a criminal atmosphere that has no deterrent. It makes a police department where nobody can solve a fucking crime.
On Obama… I admire Barack Obama as an individual. But he is part of a system so wedded to the status quo and a democracy so moneyed in terms of influence-peddling to command the voting patterns of our representatives, that he can barely get the country to focus on the idea of reforming health care, which impacts the middle class, much less do something on behalf of the underclass, for whom nobody gives a damn. So the idea that he's going to expend real political capital to reform the drug war is absurd. The best I think we can hope for from the current administration is that things might not get any worse.
I think one place where leadership is changeable is in the courts. At some point, judges might want to actually be judges again and be able to sentence people as human beings, to take into account the totality not just of the offence, not just of some guideline on a piece of paper, but of who this person is, what they represent to their community, their family, what the real nature of their crime is.
After covering the drug war as a journalist, and after researching and making The Wire, it became clear that our political leadership is so necessarily wedded to the status quo, that they're so consumed with the next election, that there will never emerge a shred of leadership that will change the situation. It's up to us.
On the legal system… Jury nullification is a right that Americans have had since the 18th century. It helped get rid of alcohol prohibition in the 20s and 30s. A treasury agent would lock up your neighbour for making bathtub gin and try to get a jury of 12 people to convict. And people all over the country refused. They said: "No. That's my neighbour. He was my neighbour before you made this law. His future is my future. I may not make bathtub gin. I may not even like that he was making bathtub gin. I may even think alcohol is bad. But whatever alcohol is, it can't be worse than you putting my neighbour on the stand and threatening him with five years in jail for making something other people want.
Ultimately, the same thing has to happen with the drug war. If I am confronted with jury duty on a case where there's a drug violation and no overt act of violence, I'm not convicting. If it's not a violent offender, I'm not sending them to prison. Another person in a federal or state prison for drugs is not going to make my society any better and in fact, it's going to make it worse. So I cannot in good conscience convict this person.
On the alternative… The alternative to the drug war is to medicalise the problem, to use harm-reduction strategies that create a certain breathing space for urban society to coexist with the inevitability of drug use, but also through incorporating the populations that tend towards addiction into the greater economy. If you are 15 or 16 and you've been educated by the Baltimore city school system and all the factories are closed and you are irrelevant to the greater economy, the chance of you going down to the corner to sling drugs when you're 15 and to start getting high off product when you're 17 is enormous.
And the notion that morality is strong enough to solve people's existential crisis – of, you know, what am I here for, how does my life have meaning, how do I earn a dollar today – that's the thing we don't want to deal with as a society. We'd rather play these games over locking people up and pretending that we're at war with the "other", when in fact we're at war with ourselves.
Eugene Jarecki and the campaign to end America's war on drugs
The US war on drugs has cost one trillion dollars and resulted in 45m arrests. And yet nothing has changed, argues film-maker Eugene Jarecki. So what did the prisoners in a New York jail think when he showed them his documentary?
Brad Pitt: America's war on drugs is a charade, and a failure
The actor and executive producer of the documentary The House I Live In says US drugs policy needs a radical rethink
Russell Simmons: the war on drugs made victims of the black community
The hip-hop mogul and executive producer of The House I Live In tells of the suffering he saw while growing up in Queens
Shanequa Benitez: how I started dealing drugs
Ex-drug dealer and contributor to The House I Live In on the perils of being drawn into the dangerous world of drug dealing
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/30/david-simon-americas-war-on-drugs
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