Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the show where we talk about all things drugs. But any views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heat as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not even represent my own and nothing contained in this show should be used his medical advice or encouragement to use any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. I'm very excited about my guest today. It's David Simon, and many of you will know his name because he was the creator or co creator with Edward Burns of The Wire, that fantastic TV showing to HBO in the early two thousand's, but about the drug war and about the drug world in Baltimore. He's got a new show out on HBO called We Own This City and it's in a way, uh, not a sequel. I think he's called it a sort of coda to the Wire, but also going back into Baltimore about the drug trade, about police and police corruption. So David, listen, Thanks so much for joining me on Psychoactives. You and I we've never met, but I feel like we've been sort of parallel tracks, and so I'm gonna be sharing stuff about my own life that you don't know. First all we sharing common where we're two bald, white guys who grew up in the suburbs, whose fathers were, as you call it, professional Jews right as yours worked for the Jewish social service organization but a brith mine was a rabbi, and who have been passionate for our entire adult life about ending the drug war and drug prohibition. So let me just start by asking you why did this become on such a significant part and passion of your life. Well, I wasn't passionate about it for my whole life, Um, I would say I acquired some on the ground awareness of what the drug war was accomplishing and what it wasn't because they made me the police reporter for the Baltimore Sun in the city of Baltimore. That was a happenstance. I I was. I wanted to go into journalism. I was I wanted to be a newspaperman, and I happen to get hired and they put me on the entry level beat of night police reporter. Uh. And it was in this remarkably drug saturated city of Baltimore, where the drug war was in full force and would actually ratchet up several times while I was there, And so I sort of experienced the drug war UM as an observer. I wasn't particularly interested in in the subject matter until it became my beat. I didn't have a lot of experience or interest in drugs themselves. I mean, I, you know, smoked some weed and tried some things here and there, but it was it was not I was. I had no devotional interest in in UM altered states, and this was just pure journalistic uh. Interesting and then having the beat, I you know, at first, I was just interested in how the war was progressing. I was covering it as the facts on the ground. But there came a point at which I started to realize that the policy itself was problematic. Did you find ways, you think in your reporting for the Baltimore Sun. I mean, the drug war was really beginning to go crazy in the eighties when you're covering it and the early nineties, did you find ways to put in your critical approach to this stuff? In the reporting it was it just impossible or was it somewhat possible, but you weren't thinking to do it at quite yet at that point, I think I probably got there when I got there, which is to say in the beginning, you know, I mean you got Remember I was twenty twenty one years old when I started writing for the newspaper and twenty two when they put me on that beat about the turn twenty three, and in the beginning, you're just sort of like trying to keep up with what happened yesterday. So you know, you're talking, you're talking to hops. You know, you don't have a lot of sources on the street. So when they put dope on the table, when they say, you know, this happened in the Southeast District today, we we seized, you know, this much dope and it's got a street value of X and we've got three guns with it, and they put it all on the table. You know, it's news. It's just it's it's it's what happened yesterday. So you're just in the beginning, you're just reporting without context. But you're learning, you know, you're learning to require sources and people who might you know, let you buy them a beer and talk to you, you know, law enforcement. But everything was sort of at a surface level because you're young and it's a new beat, and you're just you know, just hey, what happened yesterday? And can I get a byline? Um And there came a point, i'd say, four years into me covering the beat, when I was in my you know, it was probably about when they gave me an assignment to um do sort of a history on this one drug trafficker who had had a legendary career in Baltimore going back to the your only nineteen sixties, little Melvin Melvin Williams. And I tried to find out everything I could about this. He had just fallen for his third major charge. He had gone to jail in sixty seven, he'd gone to jail again in seventy five. He was now back at in eighty four, and he had gotten caught up in a in a federal case. And he was really a character, I mean, and sort of a guy who had cut a wide swath in Baltimore. And so I learned everything I could about him, and eventually he started talking to me from he was in Louisburg, penitentiary, and I got invited up to sort of for him to pontificate on his life, and it ended up being a long series of articles and and in talking to Melvin, I started to have doubts about the advocacy of the drug war and about what had replaced him, because in some respects UM arresting him had been as about a meaningful prosecution as you could have. He'd done a lot of damage, but it also had almost no effect on the on the street culture of drugs in Baltimore, as no arrest seems to ever, you know, in the long run. UM. Obviously, arresting people for drug related violence is elemental and necessary, but trying to inhibit the drug trade through a rat the power of arrests seems to be problematic. So that was the first moment. And then as I proceeded down a pace, you know, I started to look at what it was going wrong inside the police department. And I would say, just before I left the paper, by then I had I had come to the conclusion that UM drug enforcement was actually destroying law enforcement was destroying policing. I don't think anyone was arguing that anywhere that I was reading, but I was seeing it for my eyes in terms of what it was doing to the Baltimore Police Department and the State's Attorney's office to an extent. So I I started, let me say, because I mean, you know, for me, I mean just you know, back in the eighties, I'm a graduate stender at Harvard. I get myself into the State departments Arcotics Bureau. I get some clearances, and I go and interviewed d e A and Customs and FBI and c I agents and all this all around the world, Latin American, Europe, and it was kind of in the system, and I'm seeing how stupid the whole damn thing is. But what I'm also aware of is when I write my dissertation and books about this, I lean over backwards to be fair to these d A guys, even though I think what they're doing is just like the prohibition agents of old. Now to flashforward, you know, some years ago, maybe late nineties, early two thousands, the former executive editor of The New York Times, Max Frankel, writes a not bet in The Times, and he says it's time for media, for the reporters to cover the drug war the same way that that Vietnam reporters finally began to cover the Vietnam War the way that David halber stammard, he'll shade and those guys to be critical, right, So it's a kind of a calling out right. But at the same time, what I've also heard people say is that when you're a police reporter, when you're covering crime, you depend on those cops as your sources, and if you start writing critical stuff about them while you're covering it, you lose your sources, you lose your access. If there's a kind of building contradiction between covering the drug war in a critical way as a daily reporter and maintaining your ability to function, and I went, I didn't have that problem. I have to say I didn't have that problem at all in the sense that I got to know a lot of cops, and some of them were abiding drug warriors. And certainly if somebody was like running the d e A Office field office in Baltimore, or somebody was the head of an oar Cotact unit, I didn't expect any real introspection about what they were doing, or any real you know, self awareness or self critique about about policy coming from them. That's not where you get. I mean, if you make a bunch of sources, if you if you work the beat hard, you eventually find the cops who are being a little bit thoughtful about what they're accomplishing and what they're not because they can't help us see it. And and what I would credit is I found a lot of cops, some some really smart, who said this is screwed up, and you know, we were not only we're not winning, we're not you know, we're undercutting what we claimed to be. And they became insightful to me. Some of the best anti drug war sources I ever got were cops who are fighting the drugs. No, no, I mean in that sense. I when I was interviewing the d e A guys who was the same thing. There were guys who were total ideologues, and there were guys whould just lie their asses off to me. But then there were people who are just cynical and just saying it's just a job, it's just to be like any other police work, and there'll be a job from my kid one day. And then there are others who were privately in favor of legalization. I'm not I'm not with you on the cynical I mean I I like, I met some cynics who were like, yeah, this is it's just what I'm doing today. But but the guys who were the best sources, who were who were really insightful about it, were bothered um and they were and they were trying to amend their priorities as best as they could within the system. Some of them were saying, look, I'm not interested in work in drug cases. I mean, the best guy I ever had, the best source I ever had, and I later ended up writing television with him, was Ed Burns, who was a homicide detective. But he would do these complex or nate wire taps that involved targeting of violent drug gangs in Baltimore that we're responsible for multiple murders. And he chose the targets because as they were responsible for multiple murders, he could not fix the overlay that was drug prohibition and that was not you know, I wasn't in his bailo Wick. He was one detective from from Baltimore, Maryland. But he could look at where all the bodies were dropping and save the LEXA and terrorist projects and target that group that was you know, busy killing people as a matter of business, and he could remove them, and in removing them, he could reduce the murder rate. And and you know, in fact, there was one wonderful story he told me about after they pulled all these guys out of Lexan and Harrison and after they had been this terrible drug war and eight six, and they basically walked through the projects. They walked up and down the stairwells. The cops did um and they said, you know, you see, you're also still selling drugs here. We know that, but nobody's shooting anybody. And if if you can figure out how not to keep shooting, you know, and not to shoot everybody, we won't be back for a while. In a sense, they were saying, harm reduction is like, can you guys figure out how to sell this ship without killing each other? And when you can't, we have to come and address that. And so that was a very sort of sophistic for n That was a very sophisticated message to be putting out. But of course they were not. That was not the commander of the homicide unit. I'm sorry that their connection or the d A Field Office people that that was. That was a homicide detective who was looking at murders. So there were people who were laying in the cut, so to speak, who were very smart about the drug war, and they were not cynical. They were trying to do the best police work under the circumstances they could well. So when you step back from reporting, right and just to you know, inform the audience, right. So David, you know, basically begins to take a leave from reporting, and first as this intensive investigation of the police, writes a book that becomes a TV series called Homicide, highly regarded, then goes and does The Corner with Ed Burns, which is another incredible book, very highly regarded, also becomes a TV I think mini series. And I think these two things kind of come together to help you produce you know, The Wire in the early two thousands in a way on the one hand looking at the cops and other hand looking at people selling drugs on the street in that whole world. But what you're very much doing is very much in the tradition of drug ethnography. And when you wrote The Corner, you credited a book by Elliott Libau, who in their early sixties wrote a book Tally's Corner about street corner life in d C. But there was Ed Preble was the guide father of drug ethnographers, did an articles called Taking Care of Bigness. And there was Mike Agar Philippe Bougua, who I don't know if you've heard about a crup, but I had him on episodes who did in Search of Respect and righteous? Don't think where He's spent many years immersed in these communities, and in some ways Sam canonists right with Dreamland at least of us, although he comes to different conclusions than you and I do on the drug war. But when you start to immerse yourself right in this street life, in this world, to feel like a fundamental sort of freedom from the demands of reporting, that you're able able to go deeper, and do you see yourself in perceptions changing in fundamental way when you do that, first with the cops and then with people in the drug world. Yeah. I graduated from daily reporting to doing project work in criminal justice and that was those were my later years at the sun UM. But while I was at the sun I took leaves of absence to be able to do sort of stand around and watch journalism. One year in the homicide unit, following shifted detectives and you sort of see the mass assembly line that is death investigation in a violent city. And then the second book was I went to a random drug corner with that this sort of drug saturated neighbor, and we met this broken We'd started meeting people randomly, but eventually we settled on this very broken nuclear family of mother, father son who were utterly engaged by the drug culture there. And the second book, by the time I got ready to do the Corner, My, My, My, reporting the Sun had brought me to the point. In fact, I've already written that piece about that piece about the what had gone wrong in the police. Barm basically said, you're emphasizing drug arrests, and you're emphasizing mass arrest and you're emphasizing drug prohibition, and you're not doing police work anymore. You're not responding to murders, robberts, robbery's rapes. You know, you know, a felony is no longer a felony, But you guys can go in everybody's pockets at the corner of you know, Mountain Fayett. What are you doing? And so it was a critique of police priorities that that that's serious. So even even when I left the paper to do the Corner as a as a leave of absence, I already had grave doubts about what the drug war was doing. But now I got to experience it from me from the other side, from the people being policed, and you could see how disassociative and how destructive this police department attempting to be an army of occupation was. They weren't making the neighborhood safer. They were just harvesting stats in the neighborhood, and they were and they were losing their credibility one arrest at a time, or want failure to arrest at a time in some ways with the people who lived there, and so a few and few of people were talking to them. Nothing was getting accomplished, and everyone was getting paid, but nothing was getting better. It's getting worse. So the Corner Will actually allowed me to see it from a perspective that wasn't you know you were You weren't kicking in the door with the police. You were basically with the people whose doors were being kicked in. By the way, it did not give me any regard for drugs. If you think I'm benign about the presence of drugs in American society, particularly in this era of of oxygen fent and and all that. I mean, I've lost too many people. I mean everybody, I everybody I walked behind in the corner just about is gone, and far too many of them from from overdose deaths. You know. The headline today as we're talking in early May, is that the Center Disease Controls just announced that more people died of a drug overdose in the past year than ever before, over a hundred thousand people. And it's more than all the gun deaths and motor vehicle deaths put together, plus an extra you know, tens of thousands. And one of the people who died was the actor Michael Kay Williams, who played Omar, you know, the kind of charismatic figure and the Wire who Obama and many others that was their favorite character and really extraordinary. And at one point I think I saw Michael Williams talk about how in his own struggles that the intensity of being in the Wire as an actor would sometimes bring on a relapse for him. And I just say, if what more can you say about your relationship with Michael Williams um, Michael struggled. We had a point at which he actually came to production and was very honest about the struggle he was having. We export with him what that meant and what he wanted, I mean, did he need to step back from the show, um, and from the role and and instead what he said was no, he needs to do He needed to work, He needed to orient himself around around the work. And we actually one of the guys in the production became basically the the good angel on his shoulder and stayed with him and stayed with him all the time in Baltimore and and basically pulled him through. This was probably a moment in season three of the show, of the five year run of the show, so that when Michael was working, we stopped worrying about and Michael stopped, I think worrying about relapse because he had some guardian angels around him. We obviously couldn't do that with somebody's somebody's life, you know, uh and infiniteum. I always worried about Mike. Mike was an incredibly gentle spirit who took a lot of stuff to heart and and felt like nobody else I ever experienced. He was really smart, he was really attuned to his own heart, his own pain, but he had, you know, he was attempted. And I think, you know, Um, I don't think I'm saying anything that wasn't in a toxicology report. I mean, I think, you know, if you want me, if you want me to say it bluntly, he did those things to himself, you know, and he had he had helped from the goddamn Sacklers, you know. I mean, there's nothing that has proven more lethal than um, then the whole oxy revolution, and and now fatal in the idea of these synthetic opiates that are just own people murdering them um for profit, and and the fact that it's complicit with people who are taking them, sometimes taking them for pain roll, you know, as part of pain pain regiments. But nonetheless, the power of these drugs is such that the dosage can be incredibly vulnerable. Although you know, David, it is I mean, the Sacklers deserve eternal damnation for what they did. But it's also true that the crackdown on oxy content probably held catapult first the spirit of heroin and then fentanyl, and you know, over those fatalities have increased maybe fivefold, since the peak of the thing. So on one hand and going, but the FINITYL thing is, you know, it's a different thing. Oh, I know is when people were um shooting street heroin or storting storting street heroin or coca, they weren't dying in these numbers. There is something extraordinary about what the lab has done. Yeah, in the case of Federal, we're not talking about legally produced fentinyl coming out of you know, but what we're talking about the revolution that is basically synthetic at n and and it's basically taking the drugs to another level. M Yeah. And also a dynamic of prohibition. It's the economics of prohibition. I don't care when it's hard to crack down, you shift in that direction, right, I agree with that. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not suggesting that UM prohibitions are way out of that nightmare. But I am suggesting that a lot more money should be attendant on the treatment and on the on the intervention at the human level of synthetic drugs and what they're doing even even to the attic population. Right, But it also calls for bolder solutions when you're dealing with death or stemming from an unregulated adulterated drug supply were fentanyls showing up not just as pure you know, fentanyl, but mixed in with other opioids and now stimulant drugs and everything else. Um, it calls for bolder solutions, which is why I've admired the fact that you know, you haven't pulled your punches. You know you've called not it's not just about the drug war, it's about drug prohibition and about the need for a fundamentally different strategy. Well, I mean, but I'm I'm I'm basically result based, which is to say, if you could have shown me that the draconian mass arrest of drug users or even drug sellers had resulted in lower levels of addiction, lower levels of drug purity, that um, there were less drug corners in my city than there than there are now. If you could have shown me any progress, we could have had an argument. I could said, well, yeah, it's really draconian. And you locked up a hundred thousand people in Barnmore last year, and you've ruined a lot of lives, and you've made criminal histories out of just everybody between the age of you know, fifteen and twenty five and congratulations, But yeah, you know, the out of population has been diminished, and drugs are less available and the purity is less. We could have an argument about whether the draconian use of law enforcement had done anything. Instead, everything's worse. And then I look across the aisle and I say, what's the clearance rates for murder and for robbery and for rape, for assault? Is my city more or less livable? And Baltimore is now the most violent city, one of the most violent cities in America. It's the most violent it has ever been in modern history. You're arresting half the number of people you used to arrest for doing actual crimes against people. That police work has died because there's no money in it. There's money and grabbing everybody off the corner and throwing them into the courthouse for no reason. That's how you get paid and promoted as a police officer in Baltimore, Maryland. So that part of it, you know, it's like I'm just you know, just show me what you've accomplished, and show me what you failed to accomplish, and I'll make a decision on based on whether you're gonna keep doing this or not. It'll be coaching. You know, that's my feeling on that stupid crime makes for stupid cops. And there is no there's nothing complex about an open air drug market. There's just nothing. It's you know, crawl outside of a vacant row house in Baltimore. You know, look down at your corner, um watch for ten minutes, and you know who's working with ground stash. Pull the wagon up. You know, you could actually arrest at the right people if you want it, or you don't even bother to do that, because what does the Fourth Amendment mean in Baltimore anymore? Just jump out on the corner, give this ground stash to the guy standing close to it. Every you know, you make your stats, they go to the courthouse. You get paid because when you have to show up at court the next morning. You know, when you're're working on four to twelve the night before, you now in overtime. So you're gonna get paid more than the guy who sits on his post and tries to figure out who's been robbing people in armed robberies or who's been breaking into the churches and stealing stuff out of the churches. That guy, you know, if he works that problem for a week and a half, two weeks, three weeks, maybe gets one arrest a month, and it goes into the computers and one arrest. The other guy's got forty fifty sixty seventy arrest loitering in a drug free zone, you know, distribution, you know, possession with intent possession. He gets paid, the other guy doesn't get paid. And then some some idiot and planning in research who's trying to like assess who should be promoted to sergeant or he goes to the guy with forty ARUs is you know, hey, you're you're a worker. You know you want to be a sergeant. You want to run the drug unit. And that guy ends up training the next generation of cops and not how to not to do the job you want to solve. You want to like be a cop and solve a murder or solve a string of shootings. There are skill sets utterly devoid of drug war. I mean, you need to know how to work informants and not be worked by informants. You need to know how to testify in court without perjuring yourself. You need to know how to write a search and seizure warrant. You need to know how to use various forensic tools that that that don't have any relation to the drug war. There basically skill sets that don't have anything to do with drug prohibition, and those things died. They died on the vine. When I was covering the department in the late eighties and through the nine you know, into the nineties, it's not like every cop was great. You know, there were a lot of guys who were humps, and they you know, they couldn't make a case save their lives. But they were usually in squads with one or two guys who knew how to get a case through the courthouse. They had the skill set, and so the whole squads would actually be involved and maybe solving a case. So your coronal clearance rate was sev which hey, you know that's the national average, and maybe four out of ten of those once you shake it out of court, maybe four at And people who kill somebody in Baltimore go to prison. Nowadays it's it's and one out of ten is going to prison. No wonder we have three murders a year instead of two thirty Because nobody had the drug war taught. Everybody had to not do. Police working made for stupid generations of cops, and then those generations, those those guys are now the colonels and the majors. They're teaching the lieutenants the wrong metrics, and the lieutenants are teaching the guys on the street the wrong metrics. And the only thing that it cost us was police work in America. We'll be talking more after we hear this, adm Well, David, So let's take into this both about Baltimore historically and also contemporaneously. The drug war is raging, right. And I'm a first year assist professor at Princeton, and I write these articles in prominent journals, basically saying the drug war is bust and it's prohibition is the problem, and his drug abuse is a problem, but prohibition is a failure, is doing more harm than good. We have to change it, and it's kind of hanging out there. And a month later, the new mayor of Baltimore, Kerchmok, who had been the former chief prosecutor black Man, throws away his speech at the National Conference of Mayors and gives this really remarkable speech saying, we have to put all alternatives on the table. The drug war is bust, right, And at that point, you know, smoke and I became like a you know, he was the Baltimore mayor. I was the Princeton academic and we're out there, you know, debating Charlie Wrangel, the Harlem congressman, on exactly you know. And but you know, we're on all the TV shows, and he's on Oprah and on and I'm on and we're on Donna Hue and Ona Larry King and we're doing and then these creates a task force, and I'm on part of his task force, and I'm going to Baltimore and I see him and for me, he really is one of my heroes. You know, the fact of a young aspiring politician to take that bowl, to stand and then not back away. And I saw him struggling because he didn't have the state's attorney with him, he didn't have his police chief. He finally gets the police chief. Tom Fraser was willing to go along with some of this stuff. He has to switch health commissioners. He's struggling on this stuff to really make it. He's wanting he wants to get needle exchange programs going to his HIV A s and he's being condemned by the Black church leadership in his town. And I want to know from where you were sitting as a reporter, I mean, how did this look to you. I don't know if you were covering smoke at that point or just covering on the police stuff, But what did it look like from where? From where you were saying that it was a little more complicated if you were on the ground Baltimore. I mean, I think the smoke administration, by the way, a prophet without honor for saying what he did about the drug war. I never admired a politician more um. And he did managed to get reelected become a I think the first three term mayor since Nancy Pelosi's father, Tom Dolllessandro. You know, Junior are back in the late forties and fifties. So he was I mean successful, but he cut off his broader career in terms of going for He didn't make He wasn't he wasn't considered for the Clinton cabinet. This young, incredibly dynamic former prosecutor and big city mayor. He obviously was a rising star in the Democratic Party, and that did not materialize after he did what he did, and he was vilified by wrangle and others, and you know, and and tragically, so he was right, I mean, but then, you know, I would not suggest that the Smoke administration actually had a handle on its police department or had any effect on the you know, I mean, I was I'm sorry. I was a reporter on the ground. And you know, Tom Fraser was a mess as a police as a police commissioner, and the guy before him, that the couple before him who were sort of in house, they were not particularly uh insightful about anything at Eddie Eddie Woods and Edward Tilment and basically the police department. It was business as usual. Was not like Smoke had his hand on trying to affect policy. He basically raised the idea in theory, and so we should be talking about everything. But you know, the laws stayed the same. And you know, by the way, the Baltimore mayor does not control the state's turn that's a state position. And he doesn't control the laws either. I mean he could. I mean, yeah, it's one thing to say the system. It's one thing to say that that Smoke um. I mean, he had he had the ability to you know, and with Billinson and you know his later his later health Commission. He had the ability to do some things on the health side of it, but but the drug probation went on unimpeded, and it continued to devour the police department in the wrong ways. So I mean, I'm not I'm not here to tell you that Kirk kerk Smoke, you know, took a beat on the drug war in any substantive way. He took a beat on it philosophically and in terms of being an absolute truth teller. And his truth came a lot. He came too early for anybody to um credit it or for enough people to credit it, And it came too early to save his political career because he had basically spoken out against a status quo that listen, in this country, when you say you're against drugs, or you say you're hard on crime, you have a political career. You know, when when you start talking in the amorphous ways of rationalizing the reality of drug addiction and treating it as a health dynamic. UM, that doesn't. That doesn't land on voters the same way black or white. And he had as much problem with um black community leaders in Baltimore as he did with white and when he when he started to suggesting stuff. And because the great antagonist when once he went to Capitol Hill to argue his point was Charlie Wrangle of all people, right, who also chaired the Householect Committee and Narcotics and probably did more to advance the drug war in Congress than any Republican did back in those dates. Well, Hey, the Omnibus crime under Clinton, it was a savage redressing of um sentencing that that um, oh my god. I mean we're still dealing with the fall from that. So in in the new show We Own the City, the almost most compelling and maybe central character, and this is all nonfiction, is this sergeant I think, Wayne Jenkins, who is incredibly sort of charismatic and corrupt. And there were there were three things that struck me as I'm sort of watching this show, David, I want to ask you about each of these. You know, I remember when I was doing my interviewing of d agents down in Latin America. I remember talking, I think it was to one of the guys who was the agent in charge in Bolivia, and he told me about how folks in the government had come to see him and they said, look, we want your input. We're going to appoint a new drugs are and we essentially have two choices here. Choice A. You know what we all know is he's totally clean, but he's totally ineffective. Choice B. He's going to be corrupt, but you can work with him, you can make cases. And the d A guy basically said, you know, we opted to pick Choice be the guy we knew to be corrupt because we knew we could still work and make major cases with him and take out some of the bad guys, whereas with Kay with the first option, we weren't going to get anywhere. And the Wayne Jenkins character, as portrayed in the show, and I guess in the book as well, that you based the show on, right, is somebody who is remarkably good. He has a nose for cases. And some of this involved the elements of being dirty and corrupt, but some of it is actually doing real police work the way that you would. You know, there's an element of and that's an amazing cop, and it's amazing of him. That's an incredibly evil cop. And I wonder what was your sense about, you know, do these things sometimes go hand in hand. I would be wary of saying that, uh A lot of what Wayne was doing was um, sort of legitimate police were coming. This is a guy who's probable cause extended down to UM, guys driving in an accurate and he's carrying a book bag. That's probable cause. So in some ways Quyne could be right and yet wrong in sort of the ethos of what the constitution says you're supposed to do. But beyond that he had real street instincts. He did um, and he was charismatic, and he was very clever about the use of information and informants, and he would he would parlay arrest into information in a way that good cops do for the right reasons. For him, it was often parlaying it into you know, targets that he could then rob. Wayne was permitted to become Wayne and then to maintain himself in the authority he had in the department because he put dope and guns on the table and they were chasing in the in the error when he was at his height. Um, the sophistication of the police leadership in Baltimore had at least changed from this point to from point A to point B. Point A was put dope on the table. They had come to realize that putting drugs on the table meant nothing. You know, the street value of everything is who gives a ship? You know, it just doesn't matter. There's drugs everywhere, were saturated, you know, getting a guy with a package means nothing. So to try to reduce the violence, which was up one in Baltimore, rather than make cases against shooters, which of course is the hardest kind of police work, and the kind of police worked it is really sustainable over the long term, but requires skills, they were trying to just grab guns and put guns on the table. The guns on the table is a flawed metric. You know, it sounds better, Oh, we got a bunch of guns. But of course it's a gun saturated society. You know, every day they can get a gun anywhere in Baltimore. So the idea of just like targeting the guns. But Wayne could do that. Wayne could put you know, a hundred forty guns in six months, you know, on the table for the police department, and he could make gun cases that might not hold up in court, but we're nonetheless arrest stats. And so he looked valuable and he looked incredibly valuable to police. After Freddy Gray, which was the unattended death of a man in the back of a police wagon in Baltimore, which certainly was negligent um it resulted in in an uprising or a riot, depending on your point of view. And in the wake of that, the state's attorney kind of overcharged the case, and she charged a bunch of Fourth Amendment stuff that really he wasn't legit, but she, you know, she rightly charged the death, but she actually went after the officers who had made a a an arrest that was was going to hold up in court, and she did that for political reasons. I don't have to get into it. But in the wake of that, the police department had sort of a job slow down, and guys were not getting out of the cars to even clear corners anymore. Because why would I do that when the States Attorney might indict me criminally over an argument over the Fourth Amendment. Where I might be right, I might still get or if if I'm wrong, you know, even even if I mess up on the Fourth Amendment, Jesus, the Supreme Court of the United States can't decide what the Fourth Amendment means. They keep changing the rules every every session. There's a new Fourth Amendment case, that changes when we can make a terry stop or when I can you know, when I can detain you, or when I can question you. So the guys were basically saying, why would I bother to even get out of the car, And there's this work slow down. So here here's Wayne, who's just you know, still out in the street, still putting guns to the table. They needed him even more. The city was a flame, nobody was doing police work. The murderated skyrocketed, and here's Wayne and his group and they're bringing guns in and they're bringing arrests. So he had permission. Nobody was going to look seriously at him. Well this this So there's two of the things that fall from this, right. One is it made me think. Obviously we talked about Freddy Gray and what happened in Baltimore, you know, with his being killing and the and the rioter uprising as you say, that followed that. But then also there's significant jump in homicides in Baltimore from two hundred four years and fifty year to over three hundred, which is continued on for years to you know, for ever, in the years ever since now if you look sort of jumped forward to what happened with George Floyd. Right, it almost seems like a Baltimore Freddy Gray's situation. That's once again, you know, kind of got gotten the nationalized. Right, So if you look just last year, right, I mean, homicides have jumped so much in the past two years because of the pandemic a lot of reasons. But in Philadelphia, Austin, Texas, Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, Portland, Oregon, meant, Louisville, Milwaukee, Albuquerque too, sign all broke their pre existing records for the most homicides ever. And the question rises is how much of that is this sort of post Freddie I mean, you make and we own the city. You point out the kind of cops slowdown, you know all the reasons you just described for not wanting to take any risks on the streets. Right, do you think there essentially was a nationalization of this phenomenon with cops basically saying fuck it, like, we're not gonna take any risk, We're not going to do what we should do because we know community is not supporting us. But community is not supporting us, and we're getting grief and we're the bad guys. But there's also a little bit of if we can't do police work the right in legal way, we're not going to do it at all. And what I would argue is that the drug war, over the course of generations, basically eroded everything that the Fourth Amendment stands for. And so you don't have police who understand when you can legally do it terry stop, or what the what the probable causes they can allow them to detain somebody, or when you have to mirandize somebody. These things became unimportant because you know, a generation ago when these cops were coming on the force in Baltimore, and I'm always gonna speak to Baltimore, and I mean, you can't get me to talk about what happened in to Soon if I'm not from Tucson. But watching what happened in Baltimore. We had a mayor, Marty O'Malley, who wanted to be governor very badly. In fact, he wanted to be president, and he needed he needed a miracle in Baltimore. He needed to show that he was the tough on crime. I solved the problem of Baltimore and the and the street culture that had been so destructive to the city, and so he started to um arrest everybody, and by ever everybody, I mean it was ridiculous. In a city of six hundred thousand people, his police department a hundred thousand drug arrests are not drug arrests, just all arrests in one year, one out of every six people. By by per capita, I mean, obviously there were people who were lasted seven, eight, ten times. But he basically was clearing the streets on no probable cause. There were laws on the books by this time, you know. And and for this we can bless our city council that may basically make most of the inner city a quote drug free zone, meaning it was like we've declared these ten blocks of Monument Street to be a drug free zone, meaning you can't loiter in them. That's insane that if you if you understand the Fourth Amendment, you know, wait a second, I live here on this block. You're saying I can't walk. You're well, you can walk, But are you gonna stand out here in your stoop? Yeah, I'm gonna stand. It's just it's a nice day. I'm gonna stand out here on my steps. You're going to jail O'Malley's theory was insane that it may sound. Was if I can lock everybody up who's standing hanging around on the street, they can't shoot each other, and I'll get the murders down under two hundred, as I promised. If they're in their houses, they're not gonna shoot each other. They're gonna shoot each other on the street. That's what the police commanders were told. So we locked up a hundred thousand people, and the Fourth Amendment we trained a whole generation of cops how not to basically police legally. To me, it's not like I don't want to do police work because you don't support me. It's I don't want to do police work because I don't know how to do police work. I no longer understand the difference between somebody who truly is loitering and and and who for a basic loitering statute, might you know as fragile as loitering is as as a I mean, there's a there's enough abuse of that statute, of course, but I don't even have to think about what I'm seeing them doing, or how long they're doing it, or whether or not there in any way have given me probable cause to suspect that they're trafficking in drugs on this corner. It got to the point of you're here, I got you in the wagon. You go And those are the cops who um those those became a generation later, the cops who are in the gun Traced Task Force. Phil When when O'Malley is campaigning for mayor in of Baltimore, you know a schmoke is retiring from being mayor. He's holding up your book the corner. I know at the same time that he's saying drug dealer that yes, I listen, I can't. I mean O'Malley quite frankly. Then he becomes governor. I gotta tell you back in two thousand and seven, I we had my Drug Policy Alliance. We had some lobbyists working for us in Annapolis, the state capital. There was a very minor parole reform bill. Uh O'Malley had told our allies he was gonna sign the thing. I think maybe, David, you may even have submitted written testimony in that case. You know, it looked like we were just about there, but he surrounded himself with all all the I think so with all these former prosecutors and he vetoed the damn thing, and so I always saw O'Malley and also his repudiation of Schmoke. Yeah, I mean it was just about him when he ran for president. I mean, any were any access I had to any influential Democrats to damn him, I did because I just think he was a hypocrite. You know, people think it's personal and and look I had some dust ups tossed ups with him over filming the wire in Baltimore that you know, we're hilarious in their own right. But you know, I'm a I'm a trained reporter. I don't take stuff personally. I saw him alreaty on the train a long time after we had our beefs, and like I bought him a beer and we sat there and we shot the ship and it was like, you know, it's fine. You know, we both like Irish music. It's great, you know. But the problem is is he was one of the fundamental forces that for political gain and for a very naive sense of how he could reduce violence. Um to credit him at all with a decent motive. He really impaired that police department. He taught them things and he showed them they could do things that that they should never have gone down that path, although although there was a drop right in a homicide raider in the first few years. And I guess he had a police commission at Norris who was pretty good and then he got in trouble but became one of the actors on your TV show, I believe. So he had a brief phase he had well, he had a uh maybe a decline in homicides, which you know, he brought in Eddie Norris, who was had been a detective sergeant work in murders. Like Eddie Norris understood police work, probably the last police commissioner we had who truly understood that, you know, the way you reduced crime is by knowing who's doing the bad stuff and you know, getting a warrant for the right guy and kicking at his door four in the morning and arresting him for doing what he did. That was that he Norris's sort of d n A from from his time in New York. You know, he was he was in New York at the time that they were doing that kind of work. And to his credit, I would say, you know, left to his own devices, he he got a probable meaning meaning I believe it actually happened reduction in violence over the first couple of years of the Omaliy administration. It wasn't enough to get down to the campaign promise of less than two murders a year. I think it got it down to from the three hundreds to to seventy. But when the orders started coming from city Hall to lock everybody up and mass arrest and and do what they did in New York or you know, do do a Giuliani and lock everybody up for you know, spitting on the sidewalk, Norris resisted, and Norris said, that's not it's not only not police work, it's a waste of resources, and eventually had a falling out and he left and a string of police reporters who were willing to do that kind of Actually Kevin Clark, now Kevin Clark was also from New York. He had a problem with it. And Kevin Clark found out about the cooking of the stats that happened to because here's the other thing about them all is he had a reduction in murders, but he had like a forty reduction in serious assaults and aggravated assaults and shootings, but especially aggravated assaults. No, you can't do that. It's statistically impossible. Either. That means either that the people shooting guns in Baltimore are becoming um worst shots. They're not, They're not firing as lethally as they did in previous generations. They somehow you know, you can't use their handguns anymore, or your trauma units are now saving triple the numbers that they were saving, you know the year prior, of course, And well he did hilarious stuff, I mean Schmokes last year. He went back into smokes last year of police stats and said, oh, you guys miscalculated, and he basically reclassified a bunch of common assaults under Smokes here as aggravator assaults. So that then when his numbers came down a little bit, he could make it look like his numbers came down a lot. I mean, Marty was so dirty with the status. Yeah a few as he was guy was already running for mayor and he was already composing his position paper on how he fixed Baltimore. Let me pull you, let me put you away for this for a second. So if you look at the drug arrest stats over the last few years, what you see is there's still a significant racial disproportionality, with blacks much more likely to get arrested even for things in which whites engaged in at equal rates. Right, but it's declining, and the major reason has been a significant increase by the hundreds of thousands in the number of people being arrested for meth amphetamy and offenses in recent years, which is primarily white people. So the hypothetical for you, David is could you envision doing either looking looking retrospectively or prospectively doing a show that actually focused in the way you did in the wire Are we on this city on the white metho anthetamy drug scene? I mean, because it also has a way of showing how the this issue is as much about class as it is about race. Very much. It's very much. And yeah, I listen, you could start at any point and make the same show. At this point, I would say that the um the increase in targeting of a white drug activity because the methode epidemic is has given a generational bump to the drug war, is that what seemed to be overtly racist um and and targeted towards people of color, is now raw class control. It's now just you know, are you poor, are you marginalized? Are you at the economic fringe of society? You know, are you do you have one hand on a drug? That is something that has given the drug war a sufficient bump incredibility, you know, lock up more white people and we can keep doing this. Um. And it's the opposite of the simplicity of the drug war is a racist enterprise looked. Drug probation was always targeted towards feared, feared groups. I mean, you know, the first I think the first drug statutes in this country were anti yellow peril opium denis on the West coast, you know, anti Chinese legislation, and then that goes back, you know, into the nineteenth century. But I think beyond that right now there's a general class war going on again, and poor whites are happily included. Um. But having said that, you know, if you got if you'd talked to me about the Baltimore Police Department of the nine sixties or nine fifties or nineties, um, it was ruthlessly racist and and almost proudly so. UM. And at the moment that it started to have to integrate, you would have thought that that would have humanized in some basic way the police response. My argument is the reason it didn't was that there was this overlay of drug prohibition that allowed the dehumanization to become systemic, even at the point at which that you were reducing the racial disparity in the department. And you know, one of the guys, one of the saddest interviews I ever did in my life, was Bishop Robinson. He rose to the rank of being the Secretary of Public Safety for Maryland under under William Donald Shaeffer. He came on the Baltimore Department like in nineteen fifty one and was of course young black officer. He got involved, He got involved with the old bn d D actually for a while and and was doing undercovers with them. So he was early on in the in the drug Ian nineteen fifty one, my god, and he sort of fought the drug war, and he was one of the guys who was there. He was the first black police commissioner in Baltimore that would have been the mid eighties, and then became the secretary of the Secretary of Public Safety later on. He supervised a lot of the drug war and a lot of the building of new prisons in Maryland when they were trying to arrest their way out of the cocaine epidemic in the in the eighties, early nineties, Speci particularly the nineties, and when he was retired, I sat across from an Italian restaurant in Baltimore and he looked at me and he said, the drug war was a total mistake, the total mistake. We it led us all, it led us wrong, the whole way. So just a disaster. We should have never we should have never gone there. And of course he's retired, he's speaking quietly. Nobody ever says it when they have the job. That's the hard but he but he was sincere and it was it was a guy who had given his life to it. You know. Let's take a break here and go to an ad. The other interesting thing when I think about The Wire are those episodes involving Hamster damn right, the sort of where the cops say, let's hell, allow an open air place where the junkies and the dealers and every bills can gather and we'll get him off the neighboring streets. And interestingly it's called Hamsterdam, although the real model is more sort of Needle Park from Zurich, which is where you actually had a kind of open air scene like that. But I wonder how did you come up with that idea for that? Well, look, the addiction is not going to go away, and and you know ed and I had seen um what the culture of addiction had had done to that neighborhood when we were reporting the quarters. So the idea that you can just leave it be and not not respond to it as a society is disastrous. But the idea that you can chase it all over the world and try to arrestorate it problem is also insane. So what might you plausibly do if you're a city like Baltimore, And we thought about it, we said if they could in some way practice harm reduction geographically and basically say, look, we're not going to mess with you if you're selling or buying drugs in these areas because these are you know, these are devoid of residents, devoid of you know, we we have a lot of brown fields and bottom we have a lot of excess real estate right now, it's devoid of commercial strips or schools. You know, we're doing less damage then fighting you where we're fighting you and and and not achieving anything. And then maybe we start putting social programs down there, and maybe we start doing you know, addiction outreach, and maybe we start doing community outreach and and and try to reach people and try to pull them from addiction. But while they're in the act of throws of addiction, they're not destroying neighborhoods. And the drug wars not destroying neighborhoods, and so and I came up with the idea and said, what if the commander tried to do this on a small scale, what would it look like? And I don't think we pulled the punch about making it making Hamsterdam the actual area that we conceived of, you know, an area of vacant row houses and whe else, as horrific as it would be, because I mean, you know, we and I have been through the shooting galleries of of Franklin Square over West Bottomwore. We've seen what addiction looked like and what sort of masked you know, a drug market does to a neighborhood. So we weren't trying to pull the punch or say it was gonna be pretty or saying it was gonna you know, it was gonna result, you know, sunshine and warm feelings. But we were really interested in the notion of what might you do if, if if if if reducing the harm of drug addiction was your goal societally, and the idea of you know, arresting everybody and and basically um carrying on this war was not your goal. And so that's how much were you aware of what was going on in Europe in this regard because you know, we think about it. Yeah, we knew about Cirk and we knew about you know, they're obviously liberalizations in the Netherlands had already occurred, and and and Portugal was on the way. I mean, yeah, I mean there were other people who were doing a better job of trying to rationalize. You know, it's interesting, David, I'll tell you, in terms of the empirical evidence we do, you typically see is that the early phases of the decriminalized seeing like that are almost the optimal drug policy because it doesn't bring all the risks that come with full legalization. I mean that if she has benefits as well, but also problems in terms of mass marketing, But you're doing away with most of the harms of prohibition. And so if you look at what the Dutch did with the cannabis coffee shops, if you look at what they did in the neighbor of Christiana in Denmark where they had an opener marijuana saying, if you look at the first year of Needle Park, these were all highly successful. But then what happens after a few years is that the gangsters essentially take over, the criminal organizations take over the marijuana growing, the biker gangs get involved in the production, in the production side, you know, all this sort of stuff. But I thought it was fascinating when when you did that, and if, by the way, if you have a real police response where they know how to do do casework, then you can try to interdict that. And one of the things that Ed Burns, my writing partner and former police detective. One of the things that he said, which I found really insightful, was if you could just put it up to the assistant states attorneys the prosecutors that when you grow brought in a drug arrest, they basically asked you, why did you arrest this guy? And if your answer was I was standing there and he was most to the groutstay you know you stay, I saw him. Cop drugs, and like, I'm not signing your overtime slip. Go back out and get me something better. If you could do that, you'd start to fix the police department, you know, if you But if the guy comes in and says, this is a guy I think, you know, I think he's hooked up with this guy, and I think and I think these guys shot three people in my post, and like the guy has a reason why he targeted the arrest and he says that, and and basically it's credible enough and he basically makes enough of a case so that you're listening to somebody's trying to do police work. All right, all right, well let's try to make this case. In some ways, I realized that you're you're dangerously close to something called selective prosecution. And it's got it's out in problems. But but basically, the idea of a stat is a stat is what got you there? Is if if your response to what you're talking about is to march through the Christiana neighborhood and Copenhagen and basically say I'm gonna rerest everybody, good luck that you know, that's not gonna work. That's not gonna do anything. On the other end, if you say, we've got a violent, a bunch of gangsters who are now encroaching. Who are they? How do we get them out? How do we extract them? How do we make business for them? Problematic? Wow, that's you know what they call that, They call that police work. M So I think you and I had somewhat similar reactions, um to the rise of the phrase defund the police. But why don't I just you know, you say how you perceived that phrase, both in terms of what's good about it and what's bad about it? And there's nothing good about it. Um, it's it's a it's a it's a politically disastrous phrase. I understand the impulse, which is these police agencies soak up resources that we could put some of these We could put these resources back into the communities in ways that might be meaningful. But the way that lands on a voting popular specifically in a time where crime rates arising, is are you out of your mind? And by the way, I'm not talking about like white suburbanites freaking out. I mean you go into the inter city and talk to residents in West and East Baltimore, Pimlico or Cherry hill, you know, people of color, and they're like, I don't want the police to fund and I want them to come when I call um. The equivocation and defund the police is thinking that all the police do is over police. These neighborhoods, um they over police people of color. And that is absolutely true in one sense, which is that which shouldn't matter, that which constitutes harassment, that which constitutes racial profiling, that which constitutes um. The police work that should not occur and should not be rewarded in America does occur, and these communities are brutally and uselessly over policed. Then when somebody shoots someone, or when somebody's church is broken into her, when somebody's raped or robbed, and you want the police to come and you want them to respond, nobody shows up, or if they do show up, they don't have the skill set to arrest anybody. And by the way, these neighborhoods a lot of times like they know who's doing, like you know, they're scared of this. All the guys. The guy stays on the corner, the police corps goes by. He just stabbed someone yesterday, he stabbed somebody three weeks earlier and you and nobody comes and gets him, nobody takes out the trash, when when the neighborhood wants that trash taken out, and so at that poment that neighborhood is savagely under police. And a woman named joel Leevie wrote a great book out of South central l A called Ghetto Side about what happens when there is no meaningful societal response to same murder and and when these neighborhoods don't receive a police response that results in any kind of response from the justice system. What happens is the attributed violence shows up on the only the only way you can handle the fact that somebody killed somebody in your family or your friends, or it might be gun for you, is to gun for them. Happening in Mexico and Central American of course, and exactly right. So so basically like defund is is, this is this notion of the police can't solve anything. Well, I'm sorry, but you know, the police in my time, caring the police forment, they solved seven out of ten murders and by the time it shook out of the court as four at ten people went to jail and so you had a murder rate of two twenty who are thirty in a city of seven hundred thousand. Now I got a hundred thousand people less in my city. They saw of the murders and it's one of the ten probably goes to prison on those on that casework. And the murder rate is three fifty. And we're as violent as we've ever been in modern history. Here's my motto, change the mission, not defund, not abolished. I don't want you to park the police. Tell the police you want them to do this and not this. You don't want them to over police the drug where you stop stop stupid. I mean, I agree. I think that you know, defund the police was one of the greatest gifts to the right wing in America that chant is ever delivered. And the cutting stupid drug war stuff and stupid overtime pay would be meaningful. Tell us that. I know you said you're not an expert other cities, but you know a few years ago you came up to my city, New York, and you got an award from the Osborne Association, which is a great organization doing criminal justice reform work here, and you called New York the death star of mass incarceration. Now, you know, I look at my city, were in my state where we went crazy on the drug war back in the late eighties and early nineties, and then we rolled back to drug war. My organization led the way on reforming the Rockefeller drug laws. But I remember a few years ago you had as many or more murders or homicides in Baltimore one year as we had in New Year. Our population has ten times the size of yours. So what did you mean by the death star of the I was referring to. Yeah, what I was referring to is the export from New York of the of the ideology of zero tolerance and of if they show up to squeeze your wind showed as you come out of the Midtown Tunnel, arrest them, the broken windows theory of of Rudy Giuliani. And you know that's not what you know. You want to know the things that reduced crime greatly in New York, I know them, which is one an incredible emphasis on actual police work, on debriefing everybody you arrest for a crime, and prizing information above all the guys who basically championed that in the eighties, Um defined police working in the proper way. And that happened in New York. I mean, you couldn't be it. You couldn't get a gold shield in New York without having I think too registered informants who were good, who gave you information. The the idea that making cases actually um led to police careers. It wasn't revolutionary, it was basic, but it was heralded in New York. Um and that that was one thing. And the other thing is, look, you guys had Wall Street. You know if Wall Street were North Avenue in Baltimore and North Avenue Wall Street, you know my city would be doing fine too. Because you have a thirty year run up on Wall Street. The money has to come back somewhere. And they basically rebuilt um huge tracks of Manhattan and much of the outer bus And you know, I mean, I listen. I I worked in New York in the late seventies, and I remember trying to go buy weed and Thompson Square and they sold me a bag of oregano and and I was happy to have it because I wasn't dead and be killed. And I went and smoked my cooking product because um uh, because I celebrate the fact that I had, you know, managed to live whereas I had that experience David and Damn Square and Amsterdam. Well, I'm saying the only thing that the only thing that can mugg you in Tompkins Square after after the transformation of New York because of money, because of capital, because they've rebuilt the entire city on wealth that doesn't exist for other second tier American cities. The only can mugg you in Tompkin Square now is a three star restaurant. I mean, you know, the physical transformation of New York has to do with mass capital, rebuilding a city for fun and profit, and Baltimore doesn't have that, and St. Louis and Cleveland, we don't have those same options. You know. That's the that's econ of reality. That coupled with the NYPD still being in a police agency that values information and values information over a lot of other things that police, you know, departments have misvalued in other places. Uh, those are powerful forces. So I'm curious. You have your local prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, right, I mean, and you pointed out she made a mistake on overcharging on the pretty great case, but she's been one of the pioneering progressive prosecutors when it comes to decriminalizing drug possession offenses and some other things. And what do you think about those current policies she's trying to do. And have the police been willing to go along withem or do they have no choice because the prosecutors want charge the crimes way up in Baltimore. But I don't think the crime's way up for that reason. I think the crime is way up because they can't make a case. They can't make the case they and Mosby's office is a shambles and and a lot of the veteran prosecutors have walked away, and she will not bring cases into court because a the police work is bad, but also she's abandoned the basic mission of being a prosecutor. It's one thing to say I'm going to be progressive and I'm not going to I'm not gonna be dragging mass arrest through my courthouse. That's, you know. I admire that. On the other hand, there are places where you're using charges as leverage to make real cases, and again a blanket statement where you're not going to use what's on the books so that somebody becomes a witness in a shooting or in a rape or robbery. Um, that's problematic too, because those things are you know, those those things are leverage for an honest criminal investigator. That's how people talk. People talk when they're in trouble. So there's not one single answer. It's it's a case by case assessment of where am I going to, where am I going to use my my, my agency's resources for, and what am I gonna achieve? And the fact is, well, she may, you know, she may be heralded for being progressive in some ways, her her office is is a goddamn mess. They can't they can't do anything right. They're they're not aggressive about the things they need to be aggressive about. You know. Years ago, UM, we started to get into see in New York City that a growing number of juries were refusing to convict people for low level drug offenses, and my organization got involved, even in a ballot initiative. I think it was in one of the dakotas that would require judges to inform jurors of their right of during nullification. It did not succeed, but I think this became an issue that you jumped on for a while. The Wires main policy argument was in the drug war. The drug wars destructive and it's not doing what you think it's doing. It's destroying police work as well as communities and families and human beings. And so we had in Time Magazine, the writers of the of the show, UM, as we finished, as we were wrapping up the run of the show, we all committed to um the fact that if we were chosen for a jury and we were presented with a drug case possession or the distribution that had no attendant violence that was charged as a result of the case, we would vote to equit. We would vote to nullify that jury. We all said it aloud and we wrote it into Time Magazine. Yeah, David, the problem is once you say it out loud, you can no longer do it. Well, I know, but you know, we were basically five guys and what we're hoping is like we can we convinced ten more to do it. So we wrote it out, We said it out loud, and I've held to it. UM. I believe in that. UM. I believe that basically what is teaching the system to respect good police work and too and to disregard that which is you know, over policing of human beings and of communities is important. And to be honest with you, I was on a jury for a drug trial in Baltimore. I was picked. I was in the box. I was one of one of I guess one of fourteen. They had alternates, and the prosecutor had missed me. He for whatever reason, he didn't know who I was. He didn't asked me a question. I guess he figured like he's Baltmore city. I got a white guy, got a white male. That's good for my jury. So the prosecutor missed me. I think the defense journey who knew I was, and he wasn't gonna say anything. And so I sat there until the judge and his jury instructions, in beginning to instruct the jury, said is there anyone here who has any objection to the nation's drug law? And I had to raise my hand. I'm not going to perjure myself. It's not, you know, not a perjurer. I had to stand up and they basically said, is there no way you can and and and so I was dismissed. So I got I got it, at least I got in the box. Yeah, yeah, I know, I remember being on a grand jury. And after two days I basically called the side of the proceduor of the room, and I said, I can't be here. You know, It's like, you know why, because part of my job is to get your boss fired. I think the whole system is bullshit, you know. And actually I managed to get off a grand jury in New York, which is not an easy thing to do. I wanted to be on the jury. I actually I wanted the case to go ahead. You know, in watching or a lot of your stuff, I mean a lot of it. You know it's about Baltimore. But you did New Orleans, you know about music, You did New York City Times Square with the Deuce, about the porn industry. You did Yonkers in the fight over housing disagregation with fascinating to me because I grew up in Yonkers a decade before that time that you didn't. But recently, just a few days ago, I just binge watched the sixth episode um Plot against America, Philip Ross novel that you turned into this wonderful mini series. And I'll tell you something, you know, just a few days ago, I was just at some New York marijuana march and I'm supposed to be a little speech, and I said, I don't want to talk to you about this, because I said, the reason that I got involved in trying to end the drug war thirty forty years ago was because I saw it as perhaps the most fundamental threat to freedom in America, my core values. But now I look around the world and I look at the rise of a totalitarian you know, China, the emergence of of Putin as it kind of wants to be a global want to be fascist, white nationalist leader, and then of course in my own country at the Republican Party becoming. I never would use the word fascist loosely as a former pol. But no, I'm not going to use it loosely. I'm saying it's specifically now applies to the direction. And I know. And so the question is I admired your doing that. I admired what you did it, But do you find that this much greater, more existential threat to our values that go way beyond the drug war? You know, in the way the drug wars stood out as a kind of shiny exam up all of posing the values we stand for as Americans, now it seems so much broader and so that goes to you personally, David, in terms of your thinking, your mind, and given you know the high likelihood that three years from now we'll have a Neil fascist Republican party controlling the White House, both Houses of Congress, and Supreme Court, and the majority state governments, how is this going to shape your work or is it not. I'm gonna keep making the stories that matter to me politically. I'm a home political writer. You know, I'm a dramatist, but I'm also I'm writing about what interests me politically, and my stance is not going to change. Um. I'm certainly being given more material every moment, But how's it gonna change? I'm not sure it's gonna it's I don't think it's transformational. I think in some respects, you're asking me what happens when we lose? You know, what happens when we turn in the direction that is um anti human and anti democratic? And the answer is, I mean, at some point, if the money or the laws impair even narrative, if if if open speech becomes vulnerable, then somebody will say you've got to stop making these shows in the same way that they're already trying to ban books, and you know the the insanity of that, and you know, um, the idea that somebody's political theory can be ameliorated by a law against it is just a level of um dystopian authoritarianism that you didn't think you were going to see in modern America ever again, and yet here we are. So I don't know how it's gonna affect it. I just I know that it's never bothered me enough to to stop doing what I'm doing. That I keep making an argument about stuff and and nobody takes the argument, or nobody passes a better law and fixes anything, you know. I mean, plot against America was about Trump. It was about a white populist um who says all the things that voters think they want to hear and meanwhile is eroding the very fundamentals of what the American Republican the American experiment are about. And we made it in the election year and when we were, um, you know, very conscious of of the stakes. And you know, I don't know whether anybody watched her, if it affected anyone's vote, but we wouldn't say it any different if if we knew Trump was about to be elected. You know what I mean. If he had won, we would have still made the same mini series. One of the guys who I really loved when I was a newspaper reporter was I have Stone. Is he Stone? Great independent voice in journalism for many many decades? Uh And in a good lefty at heart and um, Stone said something that I thought was very apt. He said, Um, sometimes the fights that you have that are where you know you can't win and you don't win, are the ones worth having. First of all, you know right is right, and don't say the wrong thing because you get to win. But second of all, maybe by you saying it and losing somewhere down the road, um, but you've created enough gravitas or enough momentum that somebody will take it to the next step and then eventually maybe somebody gets to win with it. And that's sort of That was a very prac cool distillation of something I read years ago from from Camu, I think in the Mythosisiphus, which was he said, you know, to have a to have a take on something, um or to fight for something. I'm trying. I'm really screwing up Camu here, but but I know exactly what the paragraph is basically said. You know, to commit to a just cause with the certainty of defeat is absurd, but to not commit to adjust cause because of the certainty of defeat is equally absurd. And only one of those choices um affords you the chance of human dignity. That's it, man, It's like you know, just because nobody listens to you doesn't mean the story changes. So you know, that's that's the way you gotta be if you're dealing with story time. Well, damn it, I don't know if that's an uplifting note on which to end or not to listen. Thank you ever so much for well, I'll tell you this. It's a note that it's a it's a note that I couldn't get out because my brains fried after talking for an hour after. We're gonna have to add Okay, listen, Thanks, thanks ever so much for joining man psychoactive, and I you know, more power to you, and I look forward to your next creations. Okay, take care. Thank you. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or find me on Twitter at Ethan Natalman. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by noah'm osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to a Brio s F Bianca Grimshaw and Robert bb. Next week I'll be talking with Lady Amanda Fielding. She's the founder and head of the Beckley Foundation, which is the outstanding psychelic research institute in the United Kingdom. She's been described as the Queen of Consciousness. I actually have a particular love of L s D because of its purity. I think in a way, it's the most cognitively stimulating and it's the least toxic. So even when you take it reg lee for a while, when you come off it, you don't have a hangover, you don't have any craving. There's no aspect of addiction about it. And actually one needs more discipline to take it than not to take it. In a funny sort of way, it needs discipline to take it and work with it. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it all, miss it