{"id":20429,"date":"2013-05-26T08:33:33","date_gmt":"2013-05-26T13:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20429"},"modified":"2013-05-26T08:33:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-26T13:33:33","slug":"the-war-on-drugs-is-a-holocaust-in-slow-motion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/05\/26\/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-holocaust-in-slow-motion\/","title":{"rendered":"The war on drugs is “a holocaust in slow motion”"},"content":{"rendered":"

To my surprise, the creator of the TV series The Wire<\/em> has come out against legalization of marijuana<\/a>:<\/p>\n

David Simon surged into the American mainstream with a bleak vision of the devastation wrought by drugs on his home town of Baltimore — The Wire<\/em>, hailed by many as the greatest television drama of all time. But what keeps him there is his apocalyptic and unrelenting heresy over the failed \u201cwar on drugs\u201d, the multibillion-dollar worldwide crusade launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971.<\/p>\n

When Simon brought that heresy to London last week — to take part in a debate hosted by the Observer<\/em> — he was inevitably asked about what reformers celebrate as recent \u201csuccesses\u201d — votes in Colorado and Washington to legalise marijuana.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m against it,\u201d Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. \u201cThe last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that\u2019s very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail,\u201d he continued, \u201cand getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do.\u201d<\/p>\n

If marijuana were exempted from the war on drugs, he insisted, \u201cit\u2019d be another 10 or 40 years of assigning people of colour to this dystopia.\u201d<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Simon took no prisoners. In his vision, the war on — and the curse of — drugs are inseparable from what he called, in his book, The Death of Working Class America<\/em>, the de-industrialisation and ravaging of cities that were once the engine-rooms and, in Baltimore\u2019s case, the seaboard of an industrial superpower.<\/p>\n

The war is about the disposal of what Simon called, in his most unforgiving but cogent term, \u201cexcess Americans\u201d: once a labour force, but no longer of use to capitalism. He went so far as to call the war on drugs \u201ca holocaust in slow motion\u201d.<\/p>\n

Simon said he \u201cbegins with the assumption that drugs are bad\u201d, but also that the war on drugs has \u201calways proceeded along racial lines\u201d, since the banning of opium.<\/p>\n

It is waged \u201cnot against dangerous substances but against the poor, the excess Americans,\u201d he said, and with striking and subversive originality, posited the crisis in stark economic terms: \u201cWe do not need 10-12% of our population; they\u2019ve been abandoned. They don\u2019t have barbed wire around them, but they might as well.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To my surprise, the creator of the TV series The Wire has come out against legalization of marijuana: David Simon surged into the American mainstream with a bleak vision of the devastation wrought by drugs on his home town of Baltimore — The Wire, hailed by many as the greatest television drama of all time. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,9,10,13],"tags":[119,83,98,91,199,99,101],"class_list":["post-20429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-law","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-drugs","tag-marijuana","tag-police","tag-poverty","tag-prohibition","tag-racism","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5jv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20430,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20429\/revisions\/20430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}