DON'T DECLARE DEFEAT YET IN DRUG WAR

All good things must come to an end, and so it was last Sunday with
"The Wire," the best show on TV for the last five seasons.

The HBO series that centered on a group of Baltimore police officers
- - along with the criminals, politicians and bureaucrats they had to
deal with - was superlative drama that comes along every decade or
so. It alone was worth my huge cable bill.

"The Wire" gave us insight into the war on drugs from the perspective
of both the cops and prosecutors charged with fighting it and the
assembly line of street-level dealers, drug lords and addicts who
make it necessary. Now in a Time magazine article, the show's six
writers are advocating a controversial method for ending the drug
war: jury nullification.

"What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against
them has," they wrote. "And what once began, perhaps, as a battle
against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal
war on our underclass."

As a result, "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."

No Place To Protest Laws

This really hit home to me because when I served on a jury three
years ago, we did acquit a guy charged with delivery of a controlled
substance - four "dime bags" of marijuana. The six of us weren't
trying to make a political statement; we just felt there was
reasonable doubt about his guilt.

As I sat in a Hillsborough County courtroom with jury pool members,
the prosecution and defense teams proceeded to explain the case we
would be dealing with and whether we could put aside our personal
feelings on drug laws and impartially render a verdict. Some admitted
they would have a hard time doing that, since they considered the
substance involved to be low on the list of dangers to the public.
One woman angrily screamed, "There's murderers, rapists and robbers
out there, and you brought us down here for this?!"

The prosecutor then told the lady that if she had problems with drug
laws, she should make them known to lawmakers, and that the courtroom
was not the place to protest state statutes.

"The Wire" writers, however, feel that jury nullification is a
"legitimate protest" against unjust laws. Maybe, but if their show
proved anything, the "victimless crime" of drug dealing produces a
lot of indirect victims.

Who Are Drug War Victims?

When you have guys standing on the corner selling drugs, you can
forget about any private investment in the surrounding neighborhood.
Law-abiding citizens become prisoners in their homes, and turf wars
lead to violent deaths. Letting all violators of drug laws off the
hook won't change those side effects.

And what about the people addicted to illegal narcotics and the
effect their addiction has on their families? Bubbles, the series'
resident addict, gave us an all-too-real depiction of how drugs can
destroy lives and communities.

Maybe the war on drugs has been a failure, but we shouldn't just
declare defeat and withdraw the troops. Like any war, when you're
losing, you need to come up with a winnable strategy.

Unfortunately, that probably won't happen anytime soon. A fellow
officer giving a eulogy at a mock wake for Jimmy McNulty, who ended
up leaving the force, probably summed it up best in "The Wire"'s
final episode: "He learned no lessons, acknowledged no mistakes."