"WHAT DRUGS HAVE NOT DESTROYED, THE WAR ON THEM HAS"

June 29, 2002 -- HBO's new series "The Wire" is as much a polemic against
the drug war as it is an indictment against traditional cop-show
conventions. Over the course of a season, "The Wire" follows the frustrated
attempts of federal agents and Baltimore police to topple an elaborate drug
organization run by an elusive crime lord named Avon Barksdale (Wood
Harris) and his conscience-stricken nephew D'Angelo (Larry Gilliard Jr.).
When first we meet D'Angelo, he's on trial for murder -- a rap he beats
after one of the star witnesses is coerced into changing her story by Uncle
Avon's crew. In attendance for this bogus verdict is Detective James
McNulty (played with charismatic intensity by Dominic West), a pit bull
homicide cop who takes D'Angelo's victory as an insult to his professional
ego. McNulty is subsequently brought in by the presiding judge to do a
postmortem on the case, revealing that this was only one in a slew of
uncharged homicides attributed to the Barksdale clan.

McNulty's outspoken complaints about the verdict inadvertently invoke the
wrath of his boss, who skewers him for bringing his department's ineptitude
to light.

Forced to do damage control, the deputy commissioner (the great Frankie
Faison) orders a joint task force to infiltrate Barksdale's operation in a
move that's more P.R.-minded than anything else. Hamstrung by a half-assed
investigation, McNulty doggedly pursues the Barksdale crew on his own --
putting his career at risk in the process.

Even while his P.R.-minded superiors are content to sweep the case away,
McNulty persists and eventually opens up a Pandora's box of bureaucratic
intransigence, red tape and possible corruption within the department.

"The Wire" is co-written by ex-cop Ed Burns and former Baltimore Sun
reporter David Simon, who imbues the show with the kind of stark realism
and street-level grittiness he brought as a writer to critical faves
"Homicide: Life on the Streets" and HBO's "The Corner." (Simon also wrote
"Homicide," the book that the TV series was based on, and he and Burns
coauthored "The Corner," another nonfiction work about Baltimore.) Shunning
the black-and-white simplicity of most TV police dramas, Simon examines the
parallel lives of both the drug dealers and the cops, finding a morally
skewed universe where the dealers are pragmatic entrepreneurs and the cops
are apathetic political animals driven more by ambition than altruism.
Reflecting the nihilistic vision put forth in "Traffic," "The Wire" depicts
the drug war as a perpetual, misguided exercise in futility.

At the end of the day, the show argues, junkies will be junkies, dealers
will be there to supply them, and the system will always be one step behind
both of them. As one overzealous detective lectures another in the opening
episode, the term "drug war" is a misnomer: "wars end."

Simon recently spoke by phone with Salon from his offices in Baltimore.
"The Wire" airs on HBO every Sunday night at 10 p.m.

What's behind the basic plot of "The Wire"? It's very loosely based on the
experiences of my co-writer, Ed Burns, who was a 20-year veteran of the
police department here in Baltimore. He did a lot of these protracted
investigations, often of more than a year's time, into violent drug
traffickers. It was largely based on his experiences and his frustrations
in the department. And then it was also based on my experiences at my
newspaper, which became a sort of hellish, futile bureaucracy. And then
while we were writing the scripts, Enron was happening. And the Catholic
Church. It became more of a treatise about institutions and individuals
than a straight cop show. Like "The Corner," "The Wire" deals with the drug
epidemic in Baltimore. Why do you keep coming back to this subject and this
city? I've lived in Baltimore coming up on 20 years.

I know it. I actually went to the mayor and told him, "This is gonna be a
pretty bleak show. If you're sick of this shit, we'll take our business
elsewhere." But to his credit, he said, Do it. Baltimore is one of the most
drug-involved cities in the country. It has been for years.

The police department we're portraying is not particularly exaggerated for
the late '80s, early '90s. It was that dysfunctional.

Was the show originally developed for HBO? And how do you think it would
fare on network TV?

We went straight to HBO with it. Part of it was that I already had the
existing relationship with HBO, and secondly I didn't want to have the
arguments. My experience with "Homicide" was that you'd write a very good
episode that didn't end in any kind of gratifying, emotionally uplifting
way, and the notes would be consistently the same: "Where are the
life-affirming moments?

How can our viewers hope?" I mean, the name of the show's "Homicide."
[Laughs.] ["The Wire" is] sort of a visual novel.

We knew exactly what we wanted to say about the bureaucratic aspects of the
drug war. It is about what happens in this land of ours when product ceases
to matter, when the institutions themselves become predominant over their
purpose.

Pick up the paper: You take a job, you go down to Houston, you move your
family there, you find out they gutted the company and stole your pension.

It's like whatever you believe in, whatever you commit to that's larger
than you or your family, will somehow find a way to fuck you.

Without being preachy, "The Wire" is rather critical of the way our
government has fought the drug war. What have we been doing wrong? We
bought in to a war metaphor that justifies anything.

Once you're at war, you have an enemy.

Once you have an enemy, you can do what you want. I don't think that the
government will ever find a meaningful way to police desire and human frailty.

I'm not supportive of the idea of drugs, but what drugs have not destroyed,
the war on them has managed to pry apart. [The government] created war
zones where the only economic engine is the self-perpetuating drug trade.

It survives no matter what, and they expect people to walk away from it.
The naivete is just incredible. They've spent 34 years taking these
neighborhoods and basically divesting them from the rest of America. We've
embraced a permanent war of attrition against the underclass and it can't work.

You know what's reduced drug use in Baltimore? Crack cocaine, 'cause it
kicked the living shit out of a generation of people, and now you got
heroin addicts who consider themselves lucky because they're not smoking crack.

The fact remains: Violence and drug use would not be reduced in New York,
Philadelphia, Washington or Baltimore in any respects because four or five
separate mayors discover a new form of policing.

It's because something pharmacological happened.

And, of course, that theory is rarely explored in the media. No, it's
great: When crime goes up, it's not in our control.

When it goes down, they jump in there taking credit.

I'm real down on their drug war, and I'm approaching it from somebody who
admires good police work. Writing for a larger audience, do you feel you
might be able to rectify some of these inequities, as opposed to when you
were a journalist? I don't think anything's gonna get better.

I don't buy in to that "We wrote a five-part series and now they're gonna
pass a law" -- just so the law could fuck it up worse.

I'm just trying to come to the campfire with a good story that feels very
real. I think some people may have problems with ["The Wire"] because the
expectation is of a cop show and of delivering either arrests or
denouements at the end of every episode and basically exploring good and
evil. Good and evil at this point bores the shit out of me. "The Wire"
distinguishes itself from a lot of other police shows with its
down-and-dirty style.

If you could put your finger on it, what's the key to achieving that kind
of verisimilitude?

As a reporter I made a point of getting out of the newsroom.

And I tried to spend more time with the people who were getting policed.

I think one of the things that makes this thing feel real is that the bad
guys in most cop shows are basically fodder for the cops: They're to be
chewed on and spit out and rendered as archetypes. And I got no interest in
that. Even the guys who have the capacity for being sociopaths have to be
considered in human terms. It doesn't mean you give 'em a puppy, but it's
about making everybody whole. Cop shows don't have room to do that. In one
sense, the whole cop-show thing has been so calcified and entrenched that
you basically have to take a chainsaw to it in people's minds.

In doing research for both of these series ["The Wire" and "The Corner"],
you spent time in some of the most dangerous housing projects in Baltimore.
What was that like?

You know, I'm gonna sorta subvert that and say I've never had any real
problem introducing myself to people anywhere in Baltimore or asking their
help. I felt very little resistance to anything I tried to do or anywhere I
tried to go in the city, and that goes back to my time at the Sun. It ain't
Beirut. We were treated as gracefully by people in some of these struggling
places as I was in other parts of town. It has been so mythologized: People
think you hop into your car and you immediately get ripped off, carjacked
and shot three times in the head. I mean, we went to the same corner every
day for a year and we got robbed once. It was by people who didn't know us,
who were from another neighborhood; they thought we were white guys trying
to buy dope, so they thought they were gonna get money or some vials.

I don't want to go to the notion that I'm some fucking war correspondent.
Does dealing with bleak material ever get depressing for you? The trick is
to take what can become a calcified universe and try to find some new way
to do it. It's kinda like blues music, you know. There's 12 bars. It's all
the same. But if you're listening it's not. "Homicide" was still a show
where you felt like they [the police] were doing God's work, and I don't
buy that in the drug war. I think it may have begun nobly enough as this
crusade against dangerous drugs, but it's become a war on the underclass.
Wonderfully drawn as they were, you never felt that the guys in "Homicide"
were anything but a band of brothers.

Not to open old wounds here, but was it tough to see "Homicide" to find a
larger audience?

Yeah, I wanted that show to get attention 'cause I wanted to sell books.
[NBC] didn't understand what they had in terms of the tone of the show.
They would have meetings with the people who do the promos and Tom
[Fontana] would complain that they weren't promo-ing the show. They would
say, "Well, nobody's chasing anybody, there's no violence, there's no
gunfights, and there's no ticking time bombs.

What do you want us to promo, people talking to each other?" Well, yeah.
[Laughs.] The pilot of ["The Wire"] is very much the anti-pilot. The one
thing it doesn't have is that sense of, "Are you gonna watch this show now?
Are ya? Huh? Huh? Huh? If you don't come back we might kill this guy."
That's what you have to do on network, 'cause if they don't come back,
you're cancelled. On HBO it's like, "We're in it for the long haul. Tell
the story in a smart way and we will bring people into the tent or we will
die trying." What first drew you to the world of police officers?

You seem to have an endless fascination with how these people interact in
and out of the workplace. I think they're just wonderful vehicles for
telling a story about the greater culture and the greater community.

They intersect with every problem and foible and dysfunction that we have
- -- and they're compelled to react to that. I'm actually interested in a lot
of different stuff, but I got stuck on the police beat. I wouldn't try to
write a TV show about something I didn't know. I think it's a very funny
and absurd existence to be a cop in America, particularly in a big city.

What is the cardinal sin most writers commit with cop characters? They make
them care. I mean, do you believe McNulty cares? To be honest, I don't
know. It's pretty ambiguous, actually. Exactly. I wanted it to be ambiguous
and I think there's a frightening aspect to McNulty, which is this: He
cares about making the case, clearly. But does he care about the people
he's making it for? Does he care about West Baltimore? Is he connected to
these people in any empathetic way? And I'm not going near that until
viewers are ready to accept the absolute truth of all the cops I've known,
which is, the best you can hope for from a really good cop is that he cares
about the game. To a good homicide detective, the murder is an affront to
his intellectual vanity, and I mean that in the best possible way. "This
fucker did this murder, I caught it, and he thinks he's fucking better than
me. Fuck him. He's about to find out." That's a good cop. He could be
class-conscious, racist, homophobic, sexist and still wanna solve the murder.

One of the best detectives I knew in Baltimore was a racist.

He'd catch 12 murderers a year and all the victims would be black.

But if a black family moved in next door, he'd run the father through the
computer to find out if he had charges.

It's who he was. Whenever the cop lifts the blanket and looks down at the
body and says, "Jesus, what a waste" -- they never say that. [Laughs.] They
never fuckin' say that. I think most cop shows think the guys are doing it
because it fixes the neighborhood: "I care that the world gets better,
therefore I police." Bullshit. So I wanna jettison all that. Do you hope,
in some way, that your shows might help to reform the institutions they
explore?

I'll tell you what, this would be enough for me: The next time the drug
czar or Ashcroft or any of these guys stands up and declares, "With a
little fine-tuning, with a few more prison cells, and a few more lawyers, a
few more cops, a little better armament, and another omnibus crime bill
that adds 15 more death-penalty statutes, we can win the war on drugs" --
if a slightly larger percentage of the American population looks at him and
goes, "You are so full of shit" ... that would be gratifying. - - - - - - -
- - - - - - About the writer - Ian Rothkerch is a New York writer.