THE WIRE'S WAR ON THE DRUG WAR

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and
meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue
public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed
The Wire -- our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of
inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and
as little judgment as we could muster -- tell us they've invested in
the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie
or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing
they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely
acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us
with one question: What can we do? 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?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about
economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our
tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked
the question as best we could.

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.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians -- Democrat or Republican
- -- willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to
prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most
profound and enduring policy failure.

"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. If some
few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to
reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human
beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider
their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow
jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or
Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't
fictional.

The authors are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire,
which concludes its five-year run on March 9