Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Speaker 1: Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heat as
Speaker 1: an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
Speaker 1: even represent my own and nothing contained in this show
Speaker 1: should be used his medical advice or encouragement to use
Speaker 1: any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. I'm very excited
Speaker 1: about my guest today. It's David Simon, and many of
Speaker 1: you will know his name because he was the creator
Speaker 1: or co creator with Edward Burns of The Wire, that
Speaker 1: fantastic TV showing to HBO in the early two thousand's,
Speaker 1: but about the drug war and about the drug world
Speaker 1: in Baltimore. He's got a new show out on HBO
Speaker 1: called We Own This City and it's in a way, uh,
Speaker 1: not a sequel. I think he's called it a sort
Speaker 1: of coda to the Wire, but also going back into
Speaker 1: Baltimore about the drug trade, about police and police corruption.
Speaker 1: So David, listen, Thanks so much for joining me on Psychoactives.
Speaker 1: You and I we've never met, but I feel like
Speaker 1: we've been sort of parallel tracks, and so I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be sharing stuff about my own life that you don't know.
Speaker 1: First all we sharing common where we're two bald, white
Speaker 1: guys who grew up in the suburbs, whose fathers were,
Speaker 1: as you call it, professional Jews right as yours worked
Speaker 1: for the Jewish social service organization but a brith mine
Speaker 1: was a rabbi, and who have been passionate for our
Speaker 1: entire adult life about ending the drug war and drug prohibition.
Speaker 1: So let me just start by asking you why did
Speaker 1: this become on such a significant part and passion of
Speaker 1: your life. Well, I wasn't passionate about it for my
Speaker 1: whole life, Um, I would say I acquired some on
Speaker 1: the ground awareness of what the drug war was accomplishing
Speaker 1: and what it wasn't because they made me the police
Speaker 1: reporter for the Baltimore Sun in the city of Baltimore.
Speaker 1: That was a happenstance. I I was. I wanted to
Speaker 1: go into journalism. I was I wanted to be a newspaperman,
Speaker 1: and I happen to get hired and they put me
Speaker 1: on the entry level beat of night police reporter. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was in this remarkably drug saturated city of Baltimore,
Speaker 1: where the drug war was in full force and would
Speaker 1: actually ratchet up several times while I was there, And
Speaker 1: so I sort of experienced the drug war UM as
Speaker 1: an observer. I wasn't particularly interested in in the subject
Speaker 1: matter until it became my beat. I didn't have a
Speaker 1: lot of experience or interest in drugs themselves. I mean, I,
Speaker 1: you know, smoked some weed and tried some things here
Speaker 1: and there, but it was it was not I was.
Speaker 1: I had no devotional interest in in UM altered states,
Speaker 1: and this was just pure journalistic uh. Interesting and then
Speaker 1: having the beat, I you know, at first, I was
Speaker 1: just interested in how the war was progressing. I was
Speaker 1: covering it as the facts on the ground. But there
Speaker 1: came a point at which I started to realize that
Speaker 1: the policy itself was problematic. Did you find ways, you
Speaker 1: think in your reporting for the Baltimore Sun. I mean,
Speaker 1: the drug war was really beginning to go crazy in
Speaker 1: the eighties when you're covering it and the early nineties,
Speaker 1: did you find ways to put in your critical approach
Speaker 1: to this stuff? In the reporting it was it just
Speaker 1: impossible or was it somewhat possible, but you weren't thinking
Speaker 1: to do it at quite yet at that point, I
Speaker 1: think I probably got there when I got there, which
Speaker 1: is to say in the beginning, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: you got Remember I was twenty twenty one years old
Speaker 1: when I started writing for the newspaper and twenty two
Speaker 1: when they put me on that beat about the turn
Speaker 1: twenty three, and in the beginning, you're just sort of
Speaker 1: like trying to keep up with what happened yesterday. So
Speaker 1: you know, you're talking, you're talking to hops. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't have a lot of sources on the street.
Speaker 1: So when they put dope on the table, when they say,
Speaker 1: you know, this happened in the Southeast District today, we
Speaker 1: we seized, you know, this much dope and it's got
Speaker 1: a street value of X and we've got three guns
Speaker 1: with it, and they put it all on the table.
Speaker 1: You know, it's news. It's just it's it's it's what
Speaker 1: happened yesterday. So you're just in the beginning, you're just
Speaker 1: reporting without context. But you're learning, you know, you're learning
Speaker 1: to require sources and people who might you know, let
Speaker 1: you buy them a beer and talk to you, you know,
Speaker 1: law enforcement. But everything was sort of at a surface
Speaker 1: level because you're young and it's a new beat, and
Speaker 1: you're just you know, just hey, what happened yesterday? And
Speaker 1: can I get a byline? Um And there came a point,
Speaker 1: i'd say, four years into me covering the beat, when
Speaker 1: I was in my you know, it was probably about
Speaker 1: when they gave me an assignment to um do sort
Speaker 1: of a history on this one drug trafficker who had
Speaker 1: had a legendary career in Baltimore going back to the
Speaker 1: your only nineteen sixties, little Melvin Melvin Williams. And I
Speaker 1: tried to find out everything I could about this. He
Speaker 1: had just fallen for his third major charge. He had
Speaker 1: gone to jail in sixty seven, he'd gone to jail
Speaker 1: again in seventy five. He was now back at in
Speaker 1: eighty four, and he had gotten caught up in a
Speaker 1: in a federal case. And he was really a character,
Speaker 1: I mean, and sort of a guy who had cut
Speaker 1: a wide swath in Baltimore. And so I learned everything
Speaker 1: I could about him, and eventually he started talking to
Speaker 1: me from he was in Louisburg, penitentiary, and I got
Speaker 1: invited up to sort of for him to pontificate on
Speaker 1: his life, and it ended up being a long series
Speaker 1: of articles and and in talking to Melvin, I started
Speaker 1: to have doubts about the advocacy of the drug war
Speaker 1: and about what had replaced him, because in some respects
Speaker 1: UM arresting him had been as about a meaningful prosecution
Speaker 1: as you could have. He'd done a lot of damage,
Speaker 1: but it also had almost no effect on the on
Speaker 1: the street culture of drugs in Baltimore, as no arrest
Speaker 1: seems to ever, you know, in the long run. UM. Obviously,
Speaker 1: arresting people for drug related violence is elemental and necessary,
Speaker 1: but trying to inhibit the drug trade through a rat
Speaker 1: the power of arrests seems to be problematic. So that
Speaker 1: was the first moment. And then as I proceeded down
Speaker 1: a pace, you know, I started to look at what
Speaker 1: it was going wrong inside the police department. And I
Speaker 1: would say, just before I left the paper, by then
Speaker 1: I had I had come to the conclusion that UM
Speaker 1: drug enforcement was actually destroying law enforcement was destroying policing.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone was arguing that anywhere that I
Speaker 1: was reading, but I was seeing it for my eyes
Speaker 1: in terms of what it was doing to the Baltimore
Speaker 1: Police Department and the State's Attorney's office to an extent.
Speaker 1: So I I started, let me say, because I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, for me, I mean just you know, back
Speaker 1: in the eighties, I'm a graduate stender at Harvard. I
Speaker 1: get myself into the State departments Arcotics Bureau. I get
Speaker 1: some clearances, and I go and interviewed d e A
Speaker 1: and Customs and FBI and c I agents and all
Speaker 1: this all around the world, Latin American, Europe, and it
Speaker 1: was kind of in the system, and I'm seeing how
Speaker 1: stupid the whole damn thing is. But what I'm also
Speaker 1: aware of is when I write my dissertation and books
Speaker 1: about this, I lean over backwards to be fair to
Speaker 1: these d A guys, even though I think what they're
Speaker 1: doing is just like the prohibition agents of old. Now
Speaker 1: to flashforward, you know, some years ago, maybe late nineties,
Speaker 1: early two thousands, the former executive editor of The New
Speaker 1: York Times, Max Frankel, writes a not bet in The Times,
Speaker 1: and he says it's time for media, for the reporters
Speaker 1: to cover the drug war the same way that that
Speaker 1: Vietnam reporters finally began to cover the Vietnam War the
Speaker 1: way that David halber stammard, he'll shade and those guys
Speaker 1: to be critical, right, So it's a kind of a
Speaker 1: calling out right. But at the same time, what I've
Speaker 1: also heard people say is that when you're a police reporter,
Speaker 1: when you're covering crime, you depend on those cops as
Speaker 1: your sources, and if you start writing critical stuff about
Speaker 1: them while you're covering it, you lose your sources, you
Speaker 1: lose your access. If there's a kind of building contradiction
Speaker 1: between covering the drug war in a critical way as
Speaker 1: a daily reporter and maintaining your ability to function, and
Speaker 1: I went, I didn't have that problem. I have to
Speaker 1: say I didn't have that problem at all in the
Speaker 1: sense that I got to know a lot of cops,
Speaker 1: and some of them were abiding drug warriors. And certainly
Speaker 1: if somebody was like running the d e A Office
Speaker 1: field office in Baltimore, or somebody was the head of
Speaker 1: an oar Cotact unit, I didn't expect any real introspection
Speaker 1: about what they were doing, or any real you know,
Speaker 1: self awareness or self critique about about policy coming from them.
Speaker 1: That's not where you get. I mean, if you make
Speaker 1: a bunch of sources, if you if you work the
Speaker 1: beat hard, you eventually find the cops who are being
Speaker 1: a little bit thoughtful about what they're accomplishing and what
Speaker 1: they're not because they can't help us see it. And
Speaker 1: and what I would credit is I found a lot
Speaker 1: of cops, some some really smart, who said this is
Speaker 1: screwed up, and you know, we were not only we're
Speaker 1: not winning, we're not you know, we're undercutting what we
Speaker 1: claimed to be. And they became insightful to me. Some
Speaker 1: of the best anti drug war sources I ever got
Speaker 1: were cops who are fighting the drugs. No, no, I
Speaker 1: mean in that sense. I when I was interviewing the
Speaker 1: d e A guys who was the same thing. There
Speaker 1: were guys who were total ideologues, and there were guys
Speaker 1: whould just lie their asses off to me. But then
Speaker 1: there were people who are just cynical and just saying
Speaker 1: it's just a job, it's just to be like any
Speaker 1: other police work, and there'll be a job from my
Speaker 1: kid one day. And then there are others who were
Speaker 1: privately in favor of legalization. I'm not I'm not with
Speaker 1: you on the cynical I mean I I like, I
Speaker 1: met some cynics who were like, yeah, this is it's
Speaker 1: just what I'm doing today. But but the guys who
Speaker 1: were the best sources, who were who were really insightful
Speaker 1: about it, were bothered um and they were and they
Speaker 1: were trying to amend their priorities as best as they
Speaker 1: could within the system. Some of them were saying, look,
Speaker 1: I'm not interested in work in drug cases. I mean,
Speaker 1: the best guy I ever had, the best source I
Speaker 1: ever had, and I later ended up writing television with him,
Speaker 1: was Ed Burns, who was a homicide detective. But he
Speaker 1: would do these complex or nate wire taps that involved
Speaker 1: targeting of violent drug gangs in Baltimore that we're responsible
Speaker 1: for multiple murders. And he chose the targets because as
Speaker 1: they were responsible for multiple murders, he could not fix
Speaker 1: the overlay that was drug prohibition and that was not
Speaker 1: you know, I wasn't in his bailo Wick. He was
Speaker 1: one detective from from Baltimore, Maryland. But he could look
Speaker 1: at where all the bodies were dropping and save the
Speaker 1: LEXA and terrorist projects and target that group that was
Speaker 1: you know, busy killing people as a matter of business,
Speaker 1: and he could remove them, and in removing them, he
Speaker 1: could reduce the murder rate. And and you know, in fact,
Speaker 1: there was one wonderful story he told me about after
Speaker 1: they pulled all these guys out of Lexan and Harrison
Speaker 1: and after they had been this terrible drug war and
Speaker 1: eight six, and they basically walked through the projects. They
Speaker 1: walked up and down the stairwells. The cops did um
Speaker 1: and they said, you know, you see, you're also still
Speaker 1: selling drugs here. We know that, but nobody's shooting anybody.
Speaker 1: And if if you can figure out how not to
Speaker 1: keep shooting, you know, and not to shoot everybody, we
Speaker 1: won't be back for a while. In a sense, they
Speaker 1: were saying, harm reduction is like, can you guys figure
Speaker 1: out how to sell this ship without killing each other?
Speaker 1: And when you can't, we have to come and address that.
Speaker 1: And so that was a very sort of sophistic for
Speaker 1: n That was a very sophisticated message to be putting out.
Speaker 1: But of course they were not. That was not the
Speaker 1: commander of the homicide unit. I'm sorry that their connection
Speaker 1: or the d A Field Office people that that was.
Speaker 1: That was a homicide detective who was looking at murders.
Speaker 1: So there were people who were laying in the cut,
Speaker 1: so to speak, who were very smart about the drug war,
Speaker 1: and they were not cynical. They were trying to do
Speaker 1: the best police work under the circumstances they could well.
Speaker 1: So when you step back from reporting, right and just
Speaker 1: to you know, inform the audience, right. So David, you know,
Speaker 1: basically begins to take a leave from reporting, and first
Speaker 1: as this intensive investigation of the police, writes a book
Speaker 1: that becomes a TV series called Homicide, highly regarded, then
Speaker 1: goes and does The Corner with Ed Burns, which is
Speaker 1: another incredible book, very highly regarded, also becomes a TV
Speaker 1: I think mini series. And I think these two things
Speaker 1: kind of come together to help you produce you know,
Speaker 1: The Wire in the early two thousands in a way
Speaker 1: on the one hand looking at the cops and other
Speaker 1: hand looking at people selling drugs on the street in
Speaker 1: that whole world. But what you're very much doing is
Speaker 1: very much in the tradition of drug ethnography. And when
Speaker 1: you wrote The Corner, you credited a book by Elliott Libau,
Speaker 1: who in their early sixties wrote a book Tally's Corner
Speaker 1: about street corner life in d C. But there was
Speaker 1: Ed Preble was the guide father of drug ethnographers, did
Speaker 1: an articles called Taking Care of Bigness. And there was
Speaker 1: Mike Agar Philippe Bougua, who I don't know if you've
Speaker 1: heard about a crup, but I had him on episodes
Speaker 1: who did in Search of Respect and righteous? Don't think
Speaker 1: where He's spent many years immersed in these communities, and
Speaker 1: in some ways Sam canonists right with Dreamland at least
Speaker 1: of us, although he comes to different conclusions than you
Speaker 1: and I do on the drug war. But when you
Speaker 1: start to immerse yourself right in this street life, in
Speaker 1: this world, to feel like a fundamental sort of freedom
Speaker 1: from the demands of reporting, that you're able able to
Speaker 1: go deeper, and do you see yourself in perceptions changing
Speaker 1: in fundamental way when you do that, first with the
Speaker 1: cops and then with people in the drug world. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I graduated from daily reporting to doing project work in
Speaker 1: criminal justice and that was those were my later years
Speaker 1: at the sun UM. But while I was at the
Speaker 1: sun I took leaves of absence to be able to
Speaker 1: do sort of stand around and watch journalism. One year
Speaker 1: in the homicide unit, following shifted detectives and you sort
Speaker 1: of see the mass assembly line that is death investigation
Speaker 1: in a violent city. And then the second book was
Speaker 1: I went to a random drug corner with that this
Speaker 1: sort of drug saturated neighbor, and we met this broken
Speaker 1: We'd started meeting people randomly, but eventually we settled on
Speaker 1: this very broken nuclear family of mother, father son who
Speaker 1: were utterly engaged by the drug culture there. And the
Speaker 1: second book, by the time I got ready to do
Speaker 1: the Corner, My, My, My, reporting the Sun had brought
Speaker 1: me to the point. In fact, I've already written that
Speaker 1: piece about that piece about the what had gone wrong
Speaker 1: in the police. Barm basically said, you're emphasizing drug arrests,
Speaker 1: and you're emphasizing mass arrest and you're emphasizing drug prohibition,
Speaker 1: and you're not doing police work anymore. You're not responding
Speaker 1: to murders, robberts, robbery's rapes. You know, you know, a
Speaker 1: felony is no longer a felony, But you guys can
Speaker 1: go in everybody's pockets at the corner of you know,
Speaker 1: Mountain Fayett. What are you doing? And so it was
Speaker 1: a critique of police priorities that that that's serious. So
Speaker 1: even even when I left the paper to do the
Speaker 1: Corner as a as a leave of absence, I already
Speaker 1: had grave doubts about what the drug war was doing.
Speaker 1: But now I got to experience it from me from
Speaker 1: the other side, from the people being policed, and you
Speaker 1: could see how disassociative and how destructive this police department
Speaker 1: attempting to be an army of occupation was. They weren't
Speaker 1: making the neighborhood safer. They were just harvesting stats in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood, and they were and they were losing their
Speaker 1: credibility one arrest at a time, or want failure to
Speaker 1: arrest at a time in some ways with the people
Speaker 1: who lived there, and so a few and few of
Speaker 1: people were talking to them. Nothing was getting accomplished, and
Speaker 1: everyone was getting paid, but nothing was getting better. It's
Speaker 1: getting worse. So the Corner Will actually allowed me to
Speaker 1: see it from a perspective that wasn't you know you
Speaker 1: were You weren't kicking in the door with the police.
Speaker 1: You were basically with the people whose doors were being
Speaker 1: kicked in. By the way, it did not give me
Speaker 1: any regard for drugs. If you think I'm benign about
Speaker 1: the presence of drugs in American society, particularly in this
Speaker 1: era of of oxygen fent and and all that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've lost too many people. I mean everybody, I everybody
Speaker 1: I walked behind in the corner just about is gone,
Speaker 1: and far too many of them from from overdose deaths.
Speaker 1: You know. The headline today as we're talking in early May,
Speaker 1: is that the Center Disease Controls just announced that more
Speaker 1: people died of a drug overdose in the past year
Speaker 1: than ever before, over a hundred thousand people. And it's
Speaker 1: more than all the gun deaths and motor vehicle deaths
Speaker 1: put together, plus an extra you know, tens of thousands.
Speaker 1: And one of the people who died was the actor
Speaker 1: Michael Kay Williams, who played Omar, you know, the kind
Speaker 1: of charismatic figure and the Wire who Obama and many
Speaker 1: others that was their favorite character and really extraordinary. And
Speaker 1: at one point I think I saw Michael Williams talk
Speaker 1: about how in his own struggles that the intensity of
Speaker 1: being in the Wire as an actor would sometimes bring
Speaker 1: on a relapse for him. And I just say, if
Speaker 1: what more can you say about your relationship with Michael
Speaker 1: Williams um, Michael struggled. We had a point at which
Speaker 1: he actually came to production and was very honest about
Speaker 1: the struggle he was having. We export with him what
Speaker 1: that meant and what he wanted, I mean, did he
Speaker 1: need to step back from the show, um, and from
Speaker 1: the role and and instead what he said was no,
Speaker 1: he needs to do He needed to work, He needed
Speaker 1: to orient himself around around the work. And we actually
Speaker 1: one of the guys in the production became basically the
Speaker 1: the good angel on his shoulder and stayed with him
Speaker 1: and stayed with him all the time in Baltimore and
Speaker 1: and basically pulled him through. This was probably a moment
Speaker 1: in season three of the show, of the five year
Speaker 1: run of the show, so that when Michael was working,
Speaker 1: we stopped worrying about and Michael stopped, I think worrying
Speaker 1: about relapse because he had some guardian angels around him.
Speaker 1: We obviously couldn't do that with somebody's somebody's life, you know,
Speaker 1: uh and infiniteum. I always worried about Mike. Mike was
Speaker 1: an incredibly gentle spirit who took a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: to heart and and felt like nobody else I ever experienced.
Speaker 1: He was really smart, he was really attuned to his
Speaker 1: own heart, his own pain, but he had, you know,
Speaker 1: he was attempted. And I think, you know, Um, I
Speaker 1: don't think I'm saying anything that wasn't in a toxicology report.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think, you know, if you want me,
Speaker 1: if you want me to say it bluntly, he did
Speaker 1: those things to himself, you know, and he had he
Speaker 1: had helped from the goddamn Sacklers, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's nothing that has proven more lethal than um, then
Speaker 1: the whole oxy revolution, and and now fatal in the
Speaker 1: idea of these synthetic opiates that are just own people
Speaker 1: murdering them um for profit, and and the fact that
Speaker 1: it's complicit with people who are taking them, sometimes taking
Speaker 1: them for pain roll, you know, as part of pain
Speaker 1: pain regiments. But nonetheless, the power of these drugs is
Speaker 1: such that the dosage can be incredibly vulnerable. Although you know, David,
Speaker 1: it is I mean, the Sacklers deserve eternal damnation for
Speaker 1: what they did. But it's also true that the crackdown
Speaker 1: on oxy content probably held catapult first the spirit of
Speaker 1: heroin and then fentanyl, and you know, over those fatalities
Speaker 1: have increased maybe fivefold, since the peak of the thing.
Speaker 1: So on one hand and going, but the FINITYL thing is,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a different thing. Oh, I know is
Speaker 1: when people were um shooting street heroin or storting storting
Speaker 1: street heroin or coca, they weren't dying in these numbers.
Speaker 1: There is something extraordinary about what the lab has done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the case of Federal, we're not talking about legally
Speaker 1: produced fentinyl coming out of you know, but what we're
Speaker 1: talking about the revolution that is basically synthetic at n
Speaker 1: and and it's basically taking the drugs to another level.
Speaker 1: M Yeah. And also a dynamic of prohibition. It's the
Speaker 1: economics of prohibition. I don't care when it's hard to
Speaker 1: crack down, you shift in that direction, right, I agree
Speaker 1: with that. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not suggesting that UM
Speaker 1: prohibitions are way out of that nightmare. But I am
Speaker 1: suggesting that a lot more money should be attendant on
Speaker 1: the treatment and on the on the intervention at the
Speaker 1: human level of synthetic drugs and what they're doing even
Speaker 1: even to the attic population. Right, But it also calls
Speaker 1: for bolder solutions when you're dealing with death or stemming
Speaker 1: from an unregulated adulterated drug supply were fentanyls showing up
Speaker 1: not just as pure you know, fentanyl, but mixed in
Speaker 1: with other opioids and now stimulant drugs and everything else. Um,
Speaker 1: it calls for bolder solutions, which is why I've admired
Speaker 1: the fact that you know, you haven't pulled your punches.
Speaker 1: You know you've called not it's not just about the
Speaker 1: drug war, it's about drug prohibition and about the need
Speaker 1: for a fundamentally different strategy. Well, I mean, but I'm
Speaker 1: I'm I'm basically result based, which is to say, if
Speaker 1: you could have shown me that the draconian mass arrest
Speaker 1: of drug users or even drug sellers had resulted in
Speaker 1: lower levels of addiction, lower levels of drug purity, that um,
Speaker 1: there were less drug corners in my city than there
Speaker 1: than there are now. If you could have shown me
Speaker 1: any progress, we could have had an argument. I could said, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really draconian. And you locked up a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people in Barnmore last year, and you've ruined a lot
Speaker 1: of lives, and you've made criminal histories out of just
Speaker 1: everybody between the age of you know, fifteen and twenty
Speaker 1: five and congratulations, But yeah, you know, the out of
Speaker 1: population has been diminished, and drugs are less available and
Speaker 1: the purity is less. We could have an argument about
Speaker 1: whether the draconian use of law enforcement had done anything. Instead,
Speaker 1: everything's worse. And then I look across the aisle and
Speaker 1: I say, what's the clearance rates for murder and for
Speaker 1: robbery and for rape, for assault? Is my city more
Speaker 1: or less livable? And Baltimore is now the most violent city,
Speaker 1: one of the most violent cities in America. It's the
Speaker 1: most violent it has ever been in modern history. You're
Speaker 1: arresting half the number of people you used to arrest
Speaker 1: for doing actual crimes against people. That police work has
Speaker 1: died because there's no money in it. There's money and
Speaker 1: grabbing everybody off the corner and throwing them into the
Speaker 1: courthouse for no reason. That's how you get paid and
Speaker 1: promoted as a police officer in Baltimore, Maryland. So that
Speaker 1: part of it, you know, it's like I'm just you know,
Speaker 1: just show me what you've accomplished, and show me what
Speaker 1: you failed to accomplish, and I'll make a decision on
Speaker 1: based on whether you're gonna keep doing this or not.
Speaker 1: It'll be coaching. You know, that's my feeling on that
Speaker 1: stupid crime makes for stupid cops. And there is no
Speaker 1: there's nothing complex about an open air drug market. There's
Speaker 1: just nothing. It's you know, crawl outside of a vacant
Speaker 1: row house in Baltimore. You know, look down at your corner,
Speaker 1: um watch for ten minutes, and you know who's working
Speaker 1: with ground stash. Pull the wagon up. You know, you
Speaker 1: could actually arrest at the right people if you want it,
Speaker 1: or you don't even bother to do that, because what
Speaker 1: does the Fourth Amendment mean in Baltimore anymore? Just jump
Speaker 1: out on the corner, give this ground stash to the
Speaker 1: guy standing close to it. Every you know, you make
Speaker 1: your stats, they go to the courthouse. You get paid
Speaker 1: because when you have to show up at court the
Speaker 1: next morning. You know, when you're're working on four to
Speaker 1: twelve the night before, you now in overtime. So you're
Speaker 1: gonna get paid more than the guy who sits on
Speaker 1: his post and tries to figure out who's been robbing
Speaker 1: people in armed robberies or who's been breaking into the
Speaker 1: churches and stealing stuff out of the churches. That guy,
Speaker 1: you know, if he works that problem for a week
Speaker 1: and a half, two weeks, three weeks, maybe gets one
Speaker 1: arrest a month, and it goes into the computers and
Speaker 1: one arrest. The other guy's got forty fifty sixty seventy
Speaker 1: arrest loitering in a drug free zone, you know, distribution,
Speaker 1: you know, possession with intent possession. He gets paid, the
Speaker 1: other guy doesn't get paid. And then some some idiot
Speaker 1: and planning in research who's trying to like assess who
Speaker 1: should be promoted to sergeant or he goes to the
Speaker 1: guy with forty ARUs is you know, hey, you're you're
Speaker 1: a worker. You know you want to be a sergeant.
Speaker 1: You want to run the drug unit. And that guy
Speaker 1: ends up training the next generation of cops and not
Speaker 1: how to not to do the job you want to solve.
Speaker 1: You want to like be a cop and solve a
Speaker 1: murder or solve a string of shootings. There are skill
Speaker 1: sets utterly devoid of drug war. I mean, you need
Speaker 1: to know how to work informants and not be worked
Speaker 1: by informants. You need to know how to testify in
Speaker 1: court without perjuring yourself. You need to know how to
Speaker 1: write a search and seizure warrant. You need to know
Speaker 1: how to use various forensic tools that that that don't
Speaker 1: have any relation to the drug war. There basically skill
Speaker 1: sets that don't have anything to do with drug prohibition,
Speaker 1: and those things died. They died on the vine. When
Speaker 1: I was covering the department in the late eighties and
Speaker 1: through the nine you know, into the nineties, it's not
Speaker 1: like every cop was great. You know, there were a
Speaker 1: lot of guys who were humps, and they you know,
Speaker 1: they couldn't make a case save their lives. But they
Speaker 1: were usually in squads with one or two guys who
Speaker 1: knew how to get a case through the courthouse. They
Speaker 1: had the skill set, and so the whole squads would
Speaker 1: actually be involved and maybe solving a case. So your
Speaker 1: coronal clearance rate was sev which hey, you know that's
Speaker 1: the national average, and maybe four out of ten of
Speaker 1: those once you shake it out of court, maybe four
Speaker 1: at And people who kill somebody in Baltimore go to prison.
Speaker 1: Nowadays it's it's and one out of ten is going
Speaker 1: to prison. No wonder we have three murders a year
Speaker 1: instead of two thirty Because nobody had the drug war taught.
Speaker 1: Everybody had to not do. Police working made for stupid
Speaker 1: generations of cops, and then those generations, those those guys
Speaker 1: are now the colonels and the majors. They're teaching the
Speaker 1: lieutenants the wrong metrics, and the lieutenants are teaching the
Speaker 1: guys on the street the wrong metrics. And the only
Speaker 1: thing that it cost us was police work in America.
Speaker 1: We'll be talking more after we hear this, adm Well, David,
Speaker 1: So let's take into this both about Baltimore historically and
Speaker 1: also contemporaneously. The drug war is raging, right. And I'm
Speaker 1: a first year assist professor at Princeton, and I write
Speaker 1: these articles in prominent journals, basically saying the drug war
Speaker 1: is bust and it's prohibition is the problem, and his
Speaker 1: drug abuse is a problem, but prohibition is a failure,
Speaker 1: is doing more harm than good. We have to change it,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of hanging out there. And a month later,
Speaker 1: the new mayor of Baltimore, Kerchmok, who had been the
Speaker 1: former chief prosecutor black Man, throws away his speech at
Speaker 1: the National Conference of Mayors and gives this really remarkable
Speaker 1: speech saying, we have to put all alternatives on the table.
Speaker 1: The drug war is bust, right, And at that point,
Speaker 1: you know, smoke and I became like a you know,
Speaker 1: he was the Baltimore mayor. I was the Princeton academic
Speaker 1: and we're out there, you know, debating Charlie Wrangel, the
Speaker 1: Harlem congressman, on exactly you know. And but you know,
Speaker 1: we're on all the TV shows, and he's on Oprah
Speaker 1: and on and I'm on and we're on Donna Hue
Speaker 1: and Ona Larry King and we're doing and then these
Speaker 1: creates a task force, and I'm on part of his
Speaker 1: task force, and I'm going to Baltimore and I see
Speaker 1: him and for me, he really is one of my heroes.
Speaker 1: You know, the fact of a young aspiring politician to
Speaker 1: take that bowl, to stand and then not back away.
Speaker 1: And I saw him struggling because he didn't have the
Speaker 1: state's attorney with him, he didn't have his police chief.
Speaker 1: He finally gets the police chief. Tom Fraser was willing
Speaker 1: to go along with some of this stuff. He has
Speaker 1: to switch health commissioners. He's struggling on this stuff to
Speaker 1: really make it. He's wanting he wants to get needle
Speaker 1: exchange programs going to his HIV A s and he's
Speaker 1: being condemned by the Black church leadership in his town.
Speaker 1: And I want to know from where you were sitting
Speaker 1: as a reporter, I mean, how did this look to you.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you were covering smoke at that
Speaker 1: point or just covering on the police stuff, But what
Speaker 1: did it look like from where? From where you were
Speaker 1: saying that it was a little more complicated if you
Speaker 1: were on the ground Baltimore. I mean, I think the
Speaker 1: smoke administration, by the way, a prophet without honor for
Speaker 1: saying what he did about the drug war. I never
Speaker 1: admired a politician more um. And he did managed to
Speaker 1: get reelected become a I think the first three term
Speaker 1: mayor since Nancy Pelosi's father, Tom Dolllessandro. You know, Junior
Speaker 1: are back in the late forties and fifties. So he
Speaker 1: was I mean successful, but he cut off his broader
Speaker 1: career in terms of going for He didn't make He
Speaker 1: wasn't he wasn't considered for the Clinton cabinet. This young,
Speaker 1: incredibly dynamic former prosecutor and big city mayor. He obviously
Speaker 1: was a rising star in the Democratic Party, and that
Speaker 1: did not materialize after he did what he did, and
Speaker 1: he was vilified by wrangle and others, and you know,
Speaker 1: and and tragically, so he was right, I mean, but then,
Speaker 1: you know, I would not suggest that the Smoke administration
Speaker 1: actually had a handle on its police department or had
Speaker 1: any effect on the you know, I mean, I was
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I was a reporter on the ground. And
Speaker 1: you know, Tom Fraser was a mess as a police
Speaker 1: as a police commissioner, and the guy before him, that
Speaker 1: the couple before him who were sort of in house,
Speaker 1: they were not particularly uh insightful about anything at Eddie
Speaker 1: Eddie Woods and Edward Tilment and basically the police department.
Speaker 1: It was business as usual. Was not like Smoke had
Speaker 1: his hand on trying to affect policy. He basically raised
Speaker 1: the idea in theory, and so we should be talking
Speaker 1: about everything. But you know, the laws stayed the same.
Speaker 1: And you know, by the way, the Baltimore mayor does
Speaker 1: not control the state's turn that's a state position. And
Speaker 1: he doesn't control the laws either. I mean he could.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's one thing to say the system.
Speaker 1: It's one thing to say that that Smoke um. I mean,
Speaker 1: he had he had the ability to you know, and
Speaker 1: with Billinson and you know his later his later health Commission.
Speaker 1: He had the ability to do some things on the
Speaker 1: health side of it, but but the drug probation went
Speaker 1: on unimpeded, and it continued to devour the police department
Speaker 1: in the wrong ways. So I mean, I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not here to tell you that Kirk kerk Smoke, you know,
Speaker 1: took a beat on the drug war in any substantive way.
Speaker 1: He took a beat on it philosophically and in terms
Speaker 1: of being an absolute truth teller. And his truth came
Speaker 1: a lot. He came too early for anybody to um
Speaker 1: credit it or for enough people to credit it, And
Speaker 1: it came too early to save his political career because
Speaker 1: he had basically spoken out against a status quo that listen,
Speaker 1: in this country, when you say you're against drugs, or
Speaker 1: you say you're hard on crime, you have a political career.
Speaker 1: You know, when when you start talking in the amorphous
Speaker 1: ways of rationalizing the reality of drug addiction and treating
Speaker 1: it as a health dynamic. UM, that doesn't. That doesn't
Speaker 1: land on voters the same way black or white. And
Speaker 1: he had as much problem with um black community leaders
Speaker 1: in Baltimore as he did with white and when he
Speaker 1: when he started to suggesting stuff. And because the great
Speaker 1: antagonist when once he went to Capitol Hill to argue
Speaker 1: his point was Charlie Wrangle of all people, right, who
Speaker 1: also chaired the Householect Committee and Narcotics and probably did
Speaker 1: more to advance the drug war in Congress than any
Speaker 1: Republican did back in those dates. Well, Hey, the Omnibus
Speaker 1: crime under Clinton, it was a savage redressing of um
Speaker 1: sentencing that that um, oh my god. I mean we're
Speaker 1: still dealing with the fall from that. So in in
Speaker 1: the new show We Own the City, the almost most
Speaker 1: compelling and maybe central character, and this is all nonfiction,
Speaker 1: is this sergeant I think, Wayne Jenkins, who is incredibly
Speaker 1: sort of charismatic and corrupt. And there were there were
Speaker 1: three things that struck me as I'm sort of watching
Speaker 1: this show, David, I want to ask you about each
Speaker 1: of these. You know, I remember when I was doing
Speaker 1: my interviewing of d agents down in Latin America. I
Speaker 1: remember talking, I think it was to one of the
Speaker 1: guys who was the agent in charge in Bolivia, and
Speaker 1: he told me about how folks in the government had
Speaker 1: come to see him and they said, look, we want
Speaker 1: your input. We're going to appoint a new drugs are
Speaker 1: and we essentially have two choices here. Choice A. You
Speaker 1: know what we all know is he's totally clean, but
Speaker 1: he's totally ineffective. Choice B. He's going to be corrupt,
Speaker 1: but you can work with him, you can make cases.
Speaker 1: And the d A guy basically said, you know, we
Speaker 1: opted to pick Choice be the guy we knew to
Speaker 1: be corrupt because we knew we could still work and
Speaker 1: make major cases with him and take out some of
Speaker 1: the bad guys, whereas with Kay with the first option,
Speaker 1: we weren't going to get anywhere. And the Wayne Jenkins character,
Speaker 1: as portrayed in the show, and I guess in the
Speaker 1: book as well, that you based the show on, right,
Speaker 1: is somebody who is remarkably good. He has a nose
Speaker 1: for cases. And some of this involved the elements of
Speaker 1: being dirty and corrupt, but some of it is actually
Speaker 1: doing real police work the way that you would. You know,
Speaker 1: there's an element of and that's an amazing cop, and
Speaker 1: it's amazing of him. That's an incredibly evil cop. And
Speaker 1: I wonder what was your sense about, you know, do
Speaker 1: these things sometimes go hand in hand. I would be
Speaker 1: wary of saying that, uh A lot of what Wayne
Speaker 1: was doing was um, sort of legitimate police were coming.
Speaker 1: This is a guy who's probable cause extended down to UM,
Speaker 1: guys driving in an accurate and he's carrying a book bag.
Speaker 1: That's probable cause. So in some ways Quyne could be
Speaker 1: right and yet wrong in sort of the ethos of
Speaker 1: what the constitution says you're supposed to do. But beyond
Speaker 1: that he had real street instincts. He did um, and
Speaker 1: he was charismatic, and he was very clever about the
Speaker 1: use of information and informants, and he would he would
Speaker 1: parlay arrest into information in a way that good cops
Speaker 1: do for the right reasons. For him, it was often
Speaker 1: parlaying it into you know, targets that he could then rob.
Speaker 1: Wayne was permitted to become Wayne and then to maintain
Speaker 1: himself in the authority he had in the department because
Speaker 1: he put dope and guns on the table and they
Speaker 1: were chasing in the in the error when he was
Speaker 1: at his height. Um, the sophistication of the police leadership
Speaker 1: in Baltimore had at least changed from this point to
Speaker 1: from point A to point B. Point A was put
Speaker 1: dope on the table. They had come to realize that
Speaker 1: putting drugs on the table meant nothing. You know, the
Speaker 1: street value of everything is who gives a ship? You know,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't matter. There's drugs everywhere, were saturated, you know,
Speaker 1: getting a guy with a package means nothing. So to
Speaker 1: try to reduce the violence, which was up one in Baltimore,
Speaker 1: rather than make cases against shooters, which of course is
Speaker 1: the hardest kind of police work, and the kind of
Speaker 1: police worked it is really sustainable over the long term,
Speaker 1: but requires skills, they were trying to just grab guns
Speaker 1: and put guns on the table. The guns on the
Speaker 1: table is a flawed metric. You know, it sounds better, Oh,
Speaker 1: we got a bunch of guns. But of course it's
Speaker 1: a gun saturated society. You know, every day they can
Speaker 1: get a gun anywhere in Baltimore. So the idea of
Speaker 1: just like targeting the guns. But Wayne could do that.
Speaker 1: Wayne could put you know, a hundred forty guns in
Speaker 1: six months, you know, on the table for the police department,
Speaker 1: and he could make gun cases that might not hold
Speaker 1: up in court, but we're nonetheless arrest stats. And so
Speaker 1: he looked valuable and he looked incredibly valuable to police.
Speaker 1: After Freddy Gray, which was the unattended death of a
Speaker 1: man in the back of a police wagon in Baltimore,
Speaker 1: which certainly was negligent um it resulted in in an
Speaker 1: uprising or a riot, depending on your point of view.
Speaker 1: And in the wake of that, the state's attorney kind
Speaker 1: of overcharged the case, and she charged a bunch of
Speaker 1: Fourth Amendment stuff that really he wasn't legit, but she,
Speaker 1: you know, she rightly charged the death, but she actually
Speaker 1: went after the officers who had made a a an
Speaker 1: arrest that was was going to hold up in court,
Speaker 1: and she did that for political reasons. I don't have
Speaker 1: to get into it. But in the wake of that,
Speaker 1: the police department had sort of a job slow down,
Speaker 1: and guys were not getting out of the cars to
Speaker 1: even clear corners anymore. Because why would I do that
Speaker 1: when the States Attorney might indict me criminally over an
Speaker 1: argument over the Fourth Amendment. Where I might be right,
Speaker 1: I might still get or if if I'm wrong, you know,
Speaker 1: even even if I mess up on the Fourth Amendment, Jesus,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court of the United States can't decide what
Speaker 1: the Fourth Amendment means. They keep changing the rules every
Speaker 1: every session. There's a new Fourth Amendment case, that changes
Speaker 1: when we can make a terry stop or when I
Speaker 1: can you know, when I can detain you, or when
Speaker 1: I can question you. So the guys were basically saying,
Speaker 1: why would I bother to even get out of the car,
Speaker 1: And there's this work slow down. So here here's Wayne,
Speaker 1: who's just you know, still out in the street, still
Speaker 1: putting guns to the table. They needed him even more.
Speaker 1: The city was a flame, nobody was doing police work.
Speaker 1: The murderated skyrocketed, and here's Wayne and his group and
Speaker 1: they're bringing guns in and they're bringing arrests. So he
Speaker 1: had permission. Nobody was going to look seriously at him.
Speaker 1: Well this this So there's two of the things that
Speaker 1: fall from this, right. One is it made me think.
Speaker 1: Obviously we talked about Freddy Gray and what happened in Baltimore,
Speaker 1: you know, with his being killing and the and the
Speaker 1: rioter uprising as you say, that followed that. But then
Speaker 1: also there's significant jump in homicides in Baltimore from two
Speaker 1: hundred four years and fifty year to over three hundred,
Speaker 1: which is continued on for years to you know, for ever,
Speaker 1: in the years ever since now if you look sort
Speaker 1: of jumped forward to what happened with George Floyd. Right,
Speaker 1: it almost seems like a Baltimore Freddy Gray's situation. That's
Speaker 1: once again, you know, kind of got gotten the nationalized. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you look just last year, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: homicides have jumped so much in the past two years
Speaker 1: because of the pandemic a lot of reasons. But in Philadelphia, Austin, Texas, Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, Portland, Oregon, meant, Louisville, Milwaukee,
Speaker 1: Albuquerque too, sign all broke their pre existing records for
Speaker 1: the most homicides ever. And the question rises is how
Speaker 1: much of that is this sort of post Freddie I mean,
Speaker 1: you make and we own the city. You point out
Speaker 1: the kind of cops slowdown, you know all the reasons
Speaker 1: you just described for not wanting to take any risks
Speaker 1: on the streets. Right, do you think there essentially was
Speaker 1: a nationalization of this phenomenon with cops basically saying fuck it, like,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna take any risk, We're not going to
Speaker 1: do what we should do because we know community is
Speaker 1: not supporting us. But community is not supporting us, and
Speaker 1: we're getting grief and we're the bad guys. But there's
Speaker 1: also a little bit of if we can't do police
Speaker 1: work the right in legal way, we're not going to
Speaker 1: do it at all. And what I would argue is
Speaker 1: that the drug war, over the course of generations, basically
Speaker 1: eroded everything that the Fourth Amendment stands for. And so
Speaker 1: you don't have police who understand when you can legally
Speaker 1: do it terry stop, or what the what the probable
Speaker 1: causes they can allow them to detain somebody, or when
Speaker 1: you have to mirandize somebody. These things became unimportant because
Speaker 1: you know, a generation ago when these cops were coming
Speaker 1: on the force in Baltimore, and I'm always gonna speak
Speaker 1: to Baltimore, and I mean, you can't get me to
Speaker 1: talk about what happened in to Soon if I'm not
Speaker 1: from Tucson. But watching what happened in Baltimore. We had
Speaker 1: a mayor, Marty O'Malley, who wanted to be governor very badly.
Speaker 1: In fact, he wanted to be president, and he needed
Speaker 1: he needed a miracle in Baltimore. He needed to show
Speaker 1: that he was the tough on crime. I solved the
Speaker 1: problem of Baltimore and the and the street culture that
Speaker 1: had been so destructive to the city, and so he
Speaker 1: started to um arrest everybody, and by ever everybody, I
Speaker 1: mean it was ridiculous. In a city of six hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people, his police department a hundred thousand drug arrests
Speaker 1: are not drug arrests, just all arrests in one year,
Speaker 1: one out of every six people. By by per capita,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously there were people who were lasted seven, eight,
Speaker 1: ten times. But he basically was clearing the streets on
Speaker 1: no probable cause. There were laws on the books by
Speaker 1: this time, you know. And and for this we can
Speaker 1: bless our city council that may basically make most of
Speaker 1: the inner city a quote drug free zone, meaning it
Speaker 1: was like we've declared these ten blocks of Monument Street
Speaker 1: to be a drug free zone, meaning you can't loiter
Speaker 1: in them. That's insane that if you if you understand
Speaker 1: the Fourth Amendment, you know, wait a second, I live
Speaker 1: here on this block. You're saying I can't walk. You're well,
Speaker 1: you can walk, But are you gonna stand out here
Speaker 1: in your stoop? Yeah, I'm gonna stand. It's just it's
Speaker 1: a nice day. I'm gonna stand out here on my steps.
Speaker 1: You're going to jail O'Malley's theory was insane that it
Speaker 1: may sound. Was if I can lock everybody up who's
Speaker 1: standing hanging around on the street, they can't shoot each other,
Speaker 1: and I'll get the murders down under two hundred, as
Speaker 1: I promised. If they're in their houses, they're not gonna
Speaker 1: shoot each other. They're gonna shoot each other on the street.
Speaker 1: That's what the police commanders were told. So we locked
Speaker 1: up a hundred thousand people, and the Fourth Amendment we
Speaker 1: trained a whole generation of cops how not to basically
Speaker 1: police legally. To me, it's not like I don't want
Speaker 1: to do police work because you don't support me. It's
Speaker 1: I don't want to do police work because I don't
Speaker 1: know how to do police work. I no longer understand
Speaker 1: the difference between somebody who truly is loitering and and
Speaker 1: and who for a basic loitering statute, might you know
Speaker 1: as fragile as loitering is as as a I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a there's enough abuse of that statute, of course,
Speaker 1: but I don't even have to think about what I'm
Speaker 1: seeing them doing, or how long they're doing it, or
Speaker 1: whether or not there in any way have given me
Speaker 1: probable cause to suspect that they're trafficking in drugs on
Speaker 1: this corner. It got to the point of you're here,
Speaker 1: I got you in the wagon. You go And those
Speaker 1: are the cops who um those those became a generation later,
Speaker 1: the cops who are in the gun Traced Task Force.
Speaker 1: Phil When when O'Malley is campaigning for mayor in of Baltimore,
Speaker 1: you know a schmoke is retiring from being mayor. He's
Speaker 1: holding up your book the corner. I know at the
Speaker 1: same time that he's saying drug dealer that yes, I listen,
Speaker 1: I can't. I mean O'Malley quite frankly. Then he becomes governor.
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you back in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: I we had my Drug Policy Alliance. We had some
Speaker 1: lobbyists working for us in Annapolis, the state capital. There
Speaker 1: was a very minor parole reform bill. Uh O'Malley had
Speaker 1: told our allies he was gonna sign the thing. I
Speaker 1: think maybe, David, you may even have submitted written testimony
Speaker 1: in that case. You know, it looked like we were
Speaker 1: just about there, but he surrounded himself with all all
Speaker 1: the I think so with all these former prosecutors and
Speaker 1: he vetoed the damn thing, and so I always saw
Speaker 1: O'Malley and also his repudiation of Schmoke. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it was just about him when he ran for president.
Speaker 1: I mean, any were any access I had to any
Speaker 1: influential Democrats to damn him, I did because I just
Speaker 1: think he was a hypocrite. You know, people think it's
Speaker 1: personal and and look I had some dust ups tossed
Speaker 1: ups with him over filming the wire in Baltimore that
Speaker 1: you know, we're hilarious in their own right. But you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm a trained reporter. I don't take stuff personally.
Speaker 1: I saw him alreaty on the train a long time
Speaker 1: after we had our beefs, and like I bought him
Speaker 1: a beer and we sat there and we shot the
Speaker 1: ship and it was like, you know, it's fine. You know,
Speaker 1: we both like Irish music. It's great, you know. But
Speaker 1: the problem is is he was one of the fundamental
Speaker 1: forces that for political gain and for a very naive
Speaker 1: sense of how he could reduce violence. Um to credit
Speaker 1: him at all with a decent motive. He really impaired
Speaker 1: that police department. He taught them things and he showed
Speaker 1: them they could do things that that they should never
Speaker 1: have gone down that path, although although there was a
Speaker 1: drop right in a homicide raider in the first few years.
Speaker 1: And I guess he had a police commission at Norris
Speaker 1: who was pretty good and then he got in trouble
Speaker 1: but became one of the actors on your TV show,
Speaker 1: I believe. So he had a brief phase he had well,
Speaker 1: he had a uh maybe a decline in homicides, which
Speaker 1: you know, he brought in Eddie Norris, who was had
Speaker 1: been a detective sergeant work in murders. Like Eddie Norris
Speaker 1: understood police work, probably the last police commissioner we had
Speaker 1: who truly understood that, you know, the way you reduced
Speaker 1: crime is by knowing who's doing the bad stuff and
Speaker 1: you know, getting a warrant for the right guy and
Speaker 1: kicking at his door four in the morning and arresting
Speaker 1: him for doing what he did. That was that he
Speaker 1: Norris's sort of d n A from from his time
Speaker 1: in New York. You know, he was he was in
Speaker 1: New York at the time that they were doing that
Speaker 1: kind of work. And to his credit, I would say,
Speaker 1: you know, left to his own devices, he he got
Speaker 1: a probable meaning meaning I believe it actually happened reduction
Speaker 1: in violence over the first couple of years of the
Speaker 1: Omaliy administration. It wasn't enough to get down to the
Speaker 1: campaign promise of less than two murders a year. I
Speaker 1: think it got it down to from the three hundreds
Speaker 1: to to seventy. But when the orders started coming from
Speaker 1: city Hall to lock everybody up and mass arrest and
Speaker 1: and do what they did in New York or you know,
Speaker 1: do do a Giuliani and lock everybody up for you know,
Speaker 1: spitting on the sidewalk, Norris resisted, and Norris said, that's
Speaker 1: not it's not only not police work, it's a waste
Speaker 1: of resources, and eventually had a falling out and he
Speaker 1: left and a string of police reporters who were willing
Speaker 1: to do that kind of Actually Kevin Clark, now Kevin
Speaker 1: Clark was also from New York. He had a problem
Speaker 1: with it. And Kevin Clark found out about the cooking
Speaker 1: of the stats that happened to because here's the other
Speaker 1: thing about them all is he had a reduction in murders,
Speaker 1: but he had like a forty reduction in serious assaults
Speaker 1: and aggravated assaults and shootings, but especially aggravated assaults. No,
Speaker 1: you can't do that. It's statistically impossible. Either. That means
Speaker 1: either that the people shooting guns in Baltimore are becoming
Speaker 1: um worst shots. They're not, They're not firing as lethally
Speaker 1: as they did in previous generations. They somehow you know,
Speaker 1: you can't use their handguns anymore, or your trauma units
Speaker 1: are now saving triple the numbers that they were saving,
Speaker 1: you know the year prior, of course, And well he
Speaker 1: did hilarious stuff, I mean Schmokes last year. He went
Speaker 1: back into smokes last year of police stats and said, oh,
Speaker 1: you guys miscalculated, and he basically reclassified a bunch of
Speaker 1: common assaults under Smokes here as aggravator assaults. So that
Speaker 1: then when his numbers came down a little bit, he
Speaker 1: could make it look like his numbers came down a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean, Marty was so dirty with the status. Yeah
Speaker 1: a few as he was guy was already running for
Speaker 1: mayor and he was already composing his position paper on
Speaker 1: how he fixed Baltimore. Let me pull you, let me
Speaker 1: put you away for this for a second. So if
Speaker 1: you look at the drug arrest stats over the last
Speaker 1: few years, what you see is there's still a significant
Speaker 1: racial disproportionality, with blacks much more likely to get arrested
Speaker 1: even for things in which whites engaged in at equal rates. Right,
Speaker 1: but it's declining, and the major reason has been a
Speaker 1: significant increase by the hundreds of thousands in the number
Speaker 1: of people being arrested for meth amphetamy and offenses in
Speaker 1: recent years, which is primarily white people. So the hypothetical
Speaker 1: for you, David is could you envision doing either looking
Speaker 1: looking retrospectively or prospectively doing a show that actually focused
Speaker 1: in the way you did in the wire Are we
Speaker 1: on this city on the white metho anthetamy drug scene?
Speaker 1: I mean, because it also has a way of showing
Speaker 1: how the this issue is as much about class as
Speaker 1: it is about race. Very much. It's very much. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I listen, you could start at any point and make
Speaker 1: the same show. At this point, I would say that
Speaker 1: the um the increase in targeting of a white drug
Speaker 1: activity because the methode epidemic is has given a generational
Speaker 1: bump to the drug war, is that what seemed to
Speaker 1: be overtly racist um and and targeted towards people of color,
Speaker 1: is now raw class control. It's now just you know,
Speaker 1: are you poor, are you marginalized? Are you at the
Speaker 1: economic fringe of society? You know, are you do you
Speaker 1: have one hand on a drug? That is something that
Speaker 1: has given the drug war a sufficient bump incredibility, you know,
Speaker 1: lock up more white people and we can keep doing this. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's the opposite of the simplicity of the drug
Speaker 1: war is a racist enterprise looked. Drug probation was always
Speaker 1: targeted towards feared, feared groups. I mean, you know, the
Speaker 1: first I think the first drug statutes in this country
Speaker 1: were anti yellow peril opium denis on the West coast,
Speaker 1: you know, anti Chinese legislation, and then that goes back,
Speaker 1: you know, into the nineteenth century. But I think beyond
Speaker 1: that right now there's a general class war going on again,
Speaker 1: and poor whites are happily included. Um. But having said that,
Speaker 1: you know, if you got if you'd talked to me
Speaker 1: about the Baltimore Police Department of the nine sixties or
Speaker 1: nine fifties or nineties, um, it was ruthlessly racist and
Speaker 1: and almost proudly so. UM. And at the moment that
Speaker 1: it started to have to integrate, you would have thought
Speaker 1: that that would have humanized in some basic way the
Speaker 1: police response. My argument is the reason it didn't was
Speaker 1: that there was this overlay of drug prohibition that allowed
Speaker 1: the dehumanization to become systemic, even at the point at
Speaker 1: which that you were reducing the racial disparity in the department.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the guys, one of the
Speaker 1: saddest interviews I ever did in my life, was Bishop Robinson.
Speaker 1: He rose to the rank of being the Secretary of
Speaker 1: Public Safety for Maryland under under William Donald Shaeffer. He
Speaker 1: came on the Baltimore Department like in nineteen fifty one
Speaker 1: and was of course young black officer. He got involved,
Speaker 1: He got involved with the old bn d D actually
Speaker 1: for a while and and was doing undercovers with them.
Speaker 1: So he was early on in the in the drug
Speaker 1: Ian nineteen fifty one, my god, and he sort of
Speaker 1: fought the drug war, and he was one of the
Speaker 1: guys who was there. He was the first black police
Speaker 1: commissioner in Baltimore that would have been the mid eighties,
Speaker 1: and then became the secretary of the Secretary of Public
Speaker 1: Safety later on. He supervised a lot of the drug
Speaker 1: war and a lot of the building of new prisons
Speaker 1: in Maryland when they were trying to arrest their way
Speaker 1: out of the cocaine epidemic in the in the eighties,
Speaker 1: early nineties, Speci particularly the nineties, and when he was retired,
Speaker 1: I sat across from an Italian restaurant in Baltimore and
Speaker 1: he looked at me and he said, the drug war
Speaker 1: was a total mistake, the total mistake. We it led
Speaker 1: us all, it led us wrong, the whole way. So
Speaker 1: just a disaster. We should have never we should have
Speaker 1: never gone there. And of course he's retired, he's speaking quietly.
Speaker 1: Nobody ever says it when they have the job. That's
Speaker 1: the hard but he but he was sincere and it
Speaker 1: was it was a guy who had given his life
Speaker 1: to it. You know. Let's take a break here and
Speaker 1: go to an ad. The other interesting thing when I
Speaker 1: think about The Wire are those episodes involving Hamster damn right,
Speaker 1: the sort of where the cops say, let's hell, allow
Speaker 1: an open air place where the junkies and the dealers
Speaker 1: and every bills can gather and we'll get him off
Speaker 1: the neighboring streets. And interestingly it's called Hamsterdam, although the
Speaker 1: real model is more sort of Needle Park from Zurich,
Speaker 1: which is where you actually had a kind of open
Speaker 1: air scene like that. But I wonder how did you
Speaker 1: come up with that idea for that? Well, look, the
Speaker 1: addiction is not going to go away, and and you
Speaker 1: know ed and I had seen um what the culture
Speaker 1: of addiction had had done to that neighborhood when we
Speaker 1: were reporting the quarters. So the idea that you can
Speaker 1: just leave it be and not not respond to it
Speaker 1: as a society is disastrous. But the idea that you
Speaker 1: can chase it all over the world and try to
Speaker 1: arrestorate it problem is also insane. So what might you
Speaker 1: plausibly do if you're a city like Baltimore, And we
Speaker 1: thought about it, we said if they could in some
Speaker 1: way practice harm reduction geographically and basically say, look, we're
Speaker 1: not going to mess with you if you're selling or
Speaker 1: buying drugs in these areas because these are you know,
Speaker 1: these are devoid of residents, devoid of you know, we
Speaker 1: we have a lot of brown fields and bottom we
Speaker 1: have a lot of excess real estate right now, it's
Speaker 1: devoid of commercial strips or schools. You know, we're doing
Speaker 1: less damage then fighting you where we're fighting you and
Speaker 1: and and not achieving anything. And then maybe we start
Speaker 1: putting social programs down there, and maybe we start doing
Speaker 1: you know, addiction outreach, and maybe we start doing community
Speaker 1: outreach and and and try to reach people and try
Speaker 1: to pull them from addiction. But while they're in the
Speaker 1: act of throws of addiction, they're not destroying neighborhoods. And
Speaker 1: the drug wars not destroying neighborhoods, and so and I
Speaker 1: came up with the idea and said, what if the
Speaker 1: commander tried to do this on a small scale, what
Speaker 1: would it look like? And I don't think we pulled
Speaker 1: the punch about making it making Hamsterdam the actual area
Speaker 1: that we conceived of, you know, an area of vacant
Speaker 1: row houses and whe else, as horrific as it would be,
Speaker 1: because I mean, you know, we and I have been
Speaker 1: through the shooting galleries of of Franklin Square over West Bottomwore.
Speaker 1: We've seen what addiction looked like and what sort of
Speaker 1: masked you know, a drug market does to a neighborhood.
Speaker 1: So we weren't trying to pull the punch or say
Speaker 1: it was gonna be pretty or saying it was gonna
Speaker 1: you know, it was gonna result, you know, sunshine and
Speaker 1: warm feelings. But we were really interested in the notion
Speaker 1: of what might you do if, if if if if
Speaker 1: reducing the harm of drug addiction was your goal societally,
Speaker 1: and the idea of you know, arresting everybody and and
Speaker 1: basically um carrying on this war was not your goal.
Speaker 1: And so that's how much were you aware of what
Speaker 1: was going on in Europe in this regard because you know,
Speaker 1: we think about it. Yeah, we knew about Cirk and
Speaker 1: we knew about you know, they're obviously liberalizations in the
Speaker 1: Netherlands had already occurred, and and and Portugal was on
Speaker 1: the way. I mean, yeah, I mean there were other
Speaker 1: people who were doing a better job of trying to rationalize.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting, David, I'll tell you, in terms
Speaker 1: of the empirical evidence we do, you typically see is
Speaker 1: that the early phases of the decriminalized seeing like that
Speaker 1: are almost the optimal drug policy because it doesn't bring
Speaker 1: all the risks that come with full legalization. I mean
Speaker 1: that if she has benefits as well, but also problems
Speaker 1: in terms of mass marketing, But you're doing away with
Speaker 1: most of the harms of prohibition. And so if you
Speaker 1: look at what the Dutch did with the cannabis coffee shops,
Speaker 1: if you look at what they did in the neighbor
Speaker 1: of Christiana in Denmark where they had an opener marijuana saying,
Speaker 1: if you look at the first year of Needle Park,
Speaker 1: these were all highly successful. But then what happens after
Speaker 1: a few years is that the gangsters essentially take over,
Speaker 1: the criminal organizations take over the marijuana growing, the biker
Speaker 1: gangs get involved in the production, in the production side,
Speaker 1: you know, all this sort of stuff. But I thought
Speaker 1: it was fascinating when when you did that, and if,
Speaker 1: by the way, if you have a real police response
Speaker 1: where they know how to do do casework, then you
Speaker 1: can try to interdict that. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that Ed Burns, my writing partner and former police detective.
Speaker 1: One of the things that he said, which I found
Speaker 1: really insightful, was if you could just put it up
Speaker 1: to the assistant states attorneys the prosecutors that when you
Speaker 1: grow brought in a drug arrest, they basically asked you,
Speaker 1: why did you arrest this guy? And if your answer
Speaker 1: was I was standing there and he was most to
Speaker 1: the groutstay you know you stay, I saw him. Cop drugs,
Speaker 1: and like, I'm not signing your overtime slip. Go back
Speaker 1: out and get me something better. If you could do that,
Speaker 1: you'd start to fix the police department, you know, if
Speaker 1: you But if the guy comes in and says, this
Speaker 1: is a guy I think, you know, I think he's
Speaker 1: hooked up with this guy, and I think and I
Speaker 1: think these guys shot three people in my post, and
Speaker 1: like the guy has a reason why he targeted the
Speaker 1: arrest and he says that, and and basically it's credible
Speaker 1: enough and he basically makes enough of a case so
Speaker 1: that you're listening to somebody's trying to do police work.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, well let's try to make this case.
Speaker 1: In some ways, I realized that you're you're dangerously close
Speaker 1: to something called selective prosecution. And it's got it's out
Speaker 1: in problems. But but basically, the idea of a stat
Speaker 1: is a stat is what got you there? Is if
Speaker 1: if your response to what you're talking about is to
Speaker 1: march through the Christiana neighborhood and Copenhagen and basically say
Speaker 1: I'm gonna rerest everybody, good luck that you know, that's
Speaker 1: not gonna work. That's not gonna do anything. On the
Speaker 1: other end, if you say, we've got a violent, a
Speaker 1: bunch of gangsters who are now encroaching. Who are they?
Speaker 1: How do we get them out? How do we extract them?
Speaker 1: How do we make business for them? Problematic? Wow, that's
Speaker 1: you know what they call that, They call that police work.
Speaker 1: M So I think you and I had somewhat similar reactions,
Speaker 1: um to the rise of the phrase defund the police.
Speaker 1: But why don't I just you know, you say how
Speaker 1: you perceived that phrase, both in terms of what's good
Speaker 1: about it and what's bad about it? And there's nothing
Speaker 1: good about it. Um, it's it's a it's a it's
Speaker 1: a politically disastrous phrase. I understand the impulse, which is
Speaker 1: these police agencies soak up resources that we could put
Speaker 1: some of these We could put these resources back into
Speaker 1: the communities in ways that might be meaningful. But the
Speaker 1: way that lands on a voting popular specifically in a
Speaker 1: time where crime rates arising, is are you out of
Speaker 1: your mind? And by the way, I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: like white suburbanites freaking out. I mean you go into
Speaker 1: the inter city and talk to residents in West and
Speaker 1: East Baltimore, Pimlico or Cherry hill, you know, people of color,
Speaker 1: and they're like, I don't want the police to fund
Speaker 1: and I want them to come when I call um.
Speaker 1: The equivocation and defund the police is thinking that all
Speaker 1: the police do is over police. These neighborhoods, um they
Speaker 1: over police people of color. And that is absolutely true
Speaker 1: in one sense, which is that which shouldn't matter, that
Speaker 1: which constitutes harassment, that which constitutes racial profiling, that which
Speaker 1: constitutes um. The police work that should not occur and
Speaker 1: should not be rewarded in America does occur, and these
Speaker 1: communities are brutally and uselessly over policed. Then when somebody
Speaker 1: shoots someone, or when somebody's church is broken into her,
Speaker 1: when somebody's raped or robbed, and you want the police
Speaker 1: to come and you want them to respond, nobody shows up,
Speaker 1: or if they do show up, they don't have the
Speaker 1: skill set to arrest anybody. And by the way, these
Speaker 1: neighborhoods a lot of times like they know who's doing,
Speaker 1: like you know, they're scared of this. All the guys.
Speaker 1: The guy stays on the corner, the police corps goes by.
Speaker 1: He just stabbed someone yesterday, he stabbed somebody three weeks
Speaker 1: earlier and you and nobody comes and gets him, nobody
Speaker 1: takes out the trash, when when the neighborhood wants that
Speaker 1: trash taken out, and so at that poment that neighborhood
Speaker 1: is savagely under police. And a woman named joel Leevie
Speaker 1: wrote a great book out of South central l A
Speaker 1: called Ghetto Side about what happens when there is no
Speaker 1: meaningful societal response to same murder and and when these
Speaker 1: neighborhoods don't receive a police response that results in any
Speaker 1: kind of response from the justice system. What happens is
Speaker 1: the attributed violence shows up on the only the only
Speaker 1: way you can handle the fact that somebody killed somebody
Speaker 1: in your family or your friends, or it might be
Speaker 1: gun for you, is to gun for them. Happening in
Speaker 1: Mexico and Central American of course, and exactly right. So
Speaker 1: so basically like defund is is, this is this notion
Speaker 1: of the police can't solve anything. Well, I'm sorry, but
Speaker 1: you know, the police in my time, caring the police forment,
Speaker 1: they solved seven out of ten murders and by the
Speaker 1: time it shook out of the court as four at
Speaker 1: ten people went to jail and so you had a
Speaker 1: murder rate of two twenty who are thirty in a
Speaker 1: city of seven hundred thousand. Now I got a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people less in my city. They saw of the
Speaker 1: murders and it's one of the ten probably goes to
Speaker 1: prison on those on that casework. And the murder rate
Speaker 1: is three fifty. And we're as violent as we've ever
Speaker 1: been in modern history. Here's my motto, change the mission,
Speaker 1: not defund, not abolished. I don't want you to park
Speaker 1: the police. Tell the police you want them to do
Speaker 1: this and not this. You don't want them to over
Speaker 1: police the drug where you stop stop stupid. I mean,
Speaker 1: I agree. I think that you know, defund the police
Speaker 1: was one of the greatest gifts to the right wing
Speaker 1: in America that chant is ever delivered. And the cutting
Speaker 1: stupid drug war stuff and stupid overtime pay would be meaningful.
Speaker 1: Tell us that. I know you said you're not an
Speaker 1: expert other cities, but you know a few years ago
Speaker 1: you came up to my city, New York, and you
Speaker 1: got an award from the Osborne Association, which is a
Speaker 1: great organization doing criminal justice reform work here, and you
Speaker 1: called New York the death star of mass incarceration. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, I look at my city, were in my
Speaker 1: state where we went crazy on the drug war back
Speaker 1: in the late eighties and early nineties, and then we
Speaker 1: rolled back to drug war. My organization led the way
Speaker 1: on reforming the Rockefeller drug laws. But I remember a
Speaker 1: few years ago you had as many or more murders
Speaker 1: or homicides in Baltimore one year as we had in
Speaker 1: New Year. Our population has ten times the size of yours.
Speaker 1: So what did you mean by the death star of
Speaker 1: the I was referring to. Yeah, what I was referring
Speaker 1: to is the export from New York of the of
Speaker 1: the ideology of zero tolerance and of if they show
Speaker 1: up to squeeze your wind showed as you come out
Speaker 1: of the Midtown Tunnel, arrest them, the broken windows theory
Speaker 1: of of Rudy Giuliani. And you know that's not what
Speaker 1: you know. You want to know the things that reduced
Speaker 1: crime greatly in New York, I know them, which is
Speaker 1: one an incredible emphasis on actual police work, on debriefing
Speaker 1: everybody you arrest for a crime, and prizing information above
Speaker 1: all the guys who basically championed that in the eighties,
Speaker 1: Um defined police working in the proper way. And that
Speaker 1: happened in New York. I mean, you couldn't be it.
Speaker 1: You couldn't get a gold shield in New York without
Speaker 1: having I think too registered informants who were good, who
Speaker 1: gave you information. The the idea that making cases actually
Speaker 1: um led to police careers. It wasn't revolutionary, it was basic,
Speaker 1: but it was heralded in New York. Um and that
Speaker 1: that was one thing. And the other thing is, look,
Speaker 1: you guys had Wall Street. You know if Wall Street
Speaker 1: were North Avenue in Baltimore and North Avenue Wall Street,
Speaker 1: you know my city would be doing fine too. Because
Speaker 1: you have a thirty year run up on Wall Street.
Speaker 1: The money has to come back somewhere. And they basically
Speaker 1: rebuilt um huge tracks of Manhattan and much of the
Speaker 1: outer bus And you know, I mean, I listen. I
Speaker 1: I worked in New York in the late seventies, and
Speaker 1: I remember trying to go buy weed and Thompson Square
Speaker 1: and they sold me a bag of oregano and and
Speaker 1: I was happy to have it because I wasn't dead
Speaker 1: and be killed. And I went and smoked my cooking
Speaker 1: product because um uh, because I celebrate the fact that
Speaker 1: I had, you know, managed to live whereas I had
Speaker 1: that experience David and Damn Square and Amsterdam. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: saying the only thing that the only thing that can
Speaker 1: mugg you in Tompkins Square after after the transformation of
Speaker 1: New York because of money, because of capital, because they've
Speaker 1: rebuilt the entire city on wealth that doesn't exist for
Speaker 1: other second tier American cities. The only can mugg you
Speaker 1: in Tompkin Square now is a three star restaurant. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, the physical transformation of New York has to
Speaker 1: do with mass capital, rebuilding a city for fun and profit,
Speaker 1: and Baltimore doesn't have that, and St. Louis and Cleveland,
Speaker 1: we don't have those same options. You know. That's the
Speaker 1: that's econ of reality. That coupled with the NYPD still
Speaker 1: being in a police agency that values information and values
Speaker 1: information over a lot of other things that police, you know,
Speaker 1: departments have misvalued in other places. Uh, those are powerful forces.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious. You have your local prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, and you pointed out she made a mistake
Speaker 1: on overcharging on the pretty great case, but she's been
Speaker 1: one of the pioneering progressive prosecutors when it comes to
Speaker 1: decriminalizing drug possession offenses and some other things. And what
Speaker 1: do you think about those current policies she's trying to do.
Speaker 1: And have the police been willing to go along withem
Speaker 1: or do they have no choice because the prosecutors want
Speaker 1: charge the crimes way up in Baltimore. But I don't
Speaker 1: think the crime's way up for that reason. I think
Speaker 1: the crime is way up because they can't make a case.
Speaker 1: They can't make the case they and Mosby's office is
Speaker 1: a shambles and and a lot of the veteran prosecutors
Speaker 1: have walked away, and she will not bring cases into
Speaker 1: court because a the police work is bad, but also
Speaker 1: she's abandoned the basic mission of being a prosecutor. It's
Speaker 1: one thing to say I'm going to be progressive and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to I'm not gonna be dragging mass
Speaker 1: arrest through my courthouse. That's, you know. I admire that.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, there are places where you're using
Speaker 1: charges as leverage to make real cases, and again a
Speaker 1: blanket statement where you're not going to use what's on
Speaker 1: the books so that somebody becomes a witness in a
Speaker 1: shooting or in a rape or robbery. Um, that's problematic too,
Speaker 1: because those things are you know, those those things are
Speaker 1: leverage for an honest criminal investigator. That's how people talk.
Speaker 1: People talk when they're in trouble. So there's not one
Speaker 1: single answer. It's it's a case by case assessment of
Speaker 1: where am I going to, where am I going to
Speaker 1: use my my, my agency's resources for, and what am
Speaker 1: I gonna achieve? And the fact is, well, she may,
Speaker 1: you know, she may be heralded for being progressive in
Speaker 1: some ways, her her office is is a goddamn mess.
Speaker 1: They can't they can't do anything right. They're they're not
Speaker 1: aggressive about the things they need to be aggressive about.
Speaker 1: You know. Years ago, UM, we started to get into
Speaker 1: see in New York City that a growing number of
Speaker 1: juries were refusing to convict people for low level drug offenses,
Speaker 1: and my organization got involved, even in a ballot initiative.
Speaker 1: I think it was in one of the dakotas that
Speaker 1: would require judges to inform jurors of their right of
Speaker 1: during nullification. It did not succeed, but I think this
Speaker 1: became an issue that you jumped on for a while.
Speaker 1: The Wires main policy argument was in the drug war.
Speaker 1: The drug wars destructive and it's not doing what you
Speaker 1: think it's doing. It's destroying police work as well as
Speaker 1: communities and families and human beings. And so we had
Speaker 1: in Time Magazine, the writers of the of the show, UM,
Speaker 1: as we finished, as we were wrapping up the run
Speaker 1: of the show, we all committed to um the fact
Speaker 1: that if we were chosen for a jury and we
Speaker 1: were presented with a drug case possession or the distribution
Speaker 1: that had no attendant violence that was charged as a
Speaker 1: result of the case, we would vote to equit. We
Speaker 1: would vote to nullify that jury. We all said it
Speaker 1: aloud and we wrote it into Time Magazine. Yeah, David,
Speaker 1: the problem is once you say it out loud, you
Speaker 1: can no longer do it. Well, I know, but you know,
Speaker 1: we were basically five guys and what we're hoping is
Speaker 1: like we can we convinced ten more to do it.
Speaker 1: So we wrote it out, We said it out loud,
Speaker 1: and I've held to it. UM. I believe in that. UM.
Speaker 1: I believe that basically what is teaching the system to
Speaker 1: respect good police work and too and to disregard that
Speaker 1: which is you know, over policing of human beings and
Speaker 1: of communities is important. And to be honest with you,
Speaker 1: I was on a jury for a drug trial in Baltimore.
Speaker 1: I was picked. I was in the box. I was
Speaker 1: one of one of I guess one of fourteen. They
Speaker 1: had alternates, and the prosecutor had missed me. He for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, he didn't know who I was. He didn't
Speaker 1: asked me a question. I guess he figured like he's
Speaker 1: Baltmore city. I got a white guy, got a white male.
Speaker 1: That's good for my jury. So the prosecutor missed me.
Speaker 1: I think the defense journey who knew I was, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't gonna say anything. And so I sat there
Speaker 1: until the judge and his jury instructions, in beginning to
Speaker 1: instruct the jury, said is there anyone here who has
Speaker 1: any objection to the nation's drug law? And I had
Speaker 1: to raise my hand. I'm not going to perjure myself.
Speaker 1: It's not, you know, not a perjurer. I had to
Speaker 1: stand up and they basically said, is there no way
Speaker 1: you can and and and so I was dismissed. So
Speaker 1: I got I got it, at least I got in
Speaker 1: the box. Yeah, yeah, I know, I remember being on
Speaker 1: a grand jury. And after two days I basically called
Speaker 1: the side of the proceduor of the room, and I said,
Speaker 1: I can't be here. You know, It's like, you know why,
Speaker 1: because part of my job is to get your boss fired.
Speaker 1: I think the whole system is bullshit, you know. And
Speaker 1: actually I managed to get off a grand jury in
Speaker 1: New York, which is not an easy thing to do.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be on the jury. I actually I
Speaker 1: wanted the case to go ahead. You know, in watching
Speaker 1: or a lot of your stuff, I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of it. You know it's about Baltimore. But you did
Speaker 1: New Orleans, you know about music, You did New York
Speaker 1: City Times Square with the Deuce, about the porn industry.
Speaker 1: You did Yonkers in the fight over housing disagregation with
Speaker 1: fascinating to me because I grew up in Yonkers a
Speaker 1: decade before that time that you didn't. But recently, just
Speaker 1: a few days ago, I just binge watched the sixth
Speaker 1: episode um Plot against America, Philip Ross novel that you
Speaker 1: turned into this wonderful mini series. And I'll tell you something,
Speaker 1: you know, just a few days ago, I was just
Speaker 1: at some New York marijuana march and I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: be a little speech, and I said, I don't want
Speaker 1: to talk to you about this, because I said, the
Speaker 1: reason that I got involved in trying to end the
Speaker 1: drug war thirty forty years ago was because I saw
Speaker 1: it as perhaps the most fundamental threat to freedom in America,
Speaker 1: my core values. But now I look around the world
Speaker 1: and I look at the rise of a totalitarian you know, China,
Speaker 1: the emergence of of Putin as it kind of wants
Speaker 1: to be a global want to be fascist, white nationalist leader,
Speaker 1: and then of course in my own country at the
Speaker 1: Republican Party becoming. I never would use the word fascist
Speaker 1: loosely as a former pol. But no, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to use it loosely. I'm saying it's specifically now applies
Speaker 1: to the direction. And I know. And so the question
Speaker 1: is I admired your doing that. I admired what you
Speaker 1: did it, But do you find that this much greater,
Speaker 1: more existential threat to our values that go way beyond
Speaker 1: the drug war? You know, in the way the drug
Speaker 1: wars stood out as a kind of shiny exam up
Speaker 1: all of posing the values we stand for as Americans,
Speaker 1: now it seems so much broader and so that goes
Speaker 1: to you personally, David, in terms of your thinking, your mind,
Speaker 1: and given you know the high likelihood that three years
Speaker 1: from now we'll have a Neil fascist Republican party controlling
Speaker 1: the White House, both Houses of Congress, and Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: and the majority state governments, how is this going to
Speaker 1: shape your work or is it not. I'm gonna keep
Speaker 1: making the stories that matter to me politically. I'm a
Speaker 1: home political writer. You know, I'm a dramatist, but I'm
Speaker 1: also I'm writing about what interests me politically, and my
Speaker 1: stance is not going to change. Um. I'm certainly being
Speaker 1: given more material every moment, But how's it gonna change?
Speaker 1: I'm not sure it's gonna it's I don't think it's transformational.
Speaker 1: I think in some respects, you're asking me what happens
Speaker 1: when we lose? You know, what happens when we turn
Speaker 1: in the direction that is um anti human and anti democratic?
Speaker 1: And the answer is, I mean, at some point, if
Speaker 1: the money or the laws impair even narrative, if if
Speaker 1: if open speech becomes vulnerable, then somebody will say you've
Speaker 1: got to stop making these shows in the same way
Speaker 1: that they're already trying to ban books, and you know
Speaker 1: the the insanity of that, and you know, um, the
Speaker 1: idea that somebody's political theory can be ameliorated by a
Speaker 1: law against it is just a level of um dystopian
Speaker 1: authoritarianism that you didn't think you were going to see
Speaker 1: in modern America ever again, and yet here we are.
Speaker 1: So I don't know how it's gonna affect it. I
Speaker 1: just I know that it's never bothered me enough to
Speaker 1: to stop doing what I'm doing. That I keep making
Speaker 1: an argument about stuff and and nobody takes the argument,
Speaker 1: or nobody passes a better law and fixes anything, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, plot against America was about Trump. It was
Speaker 1: about a white populist um who says all the things
Speaker 1: that voters think they want to hear and meanwhile is
Speaker 1: eroding the very fundamentals of what the American Republican the
Speaker 1: American experiment are about. And we made it in the
Speaker 1: election year and when we were, um, you know, very
Speaker 1: conscious of of the stakes. And you know, I don't
Speaker 1: know whether anybody watched her, if it affected anyone's vote,
Speaker 1: but we wouldn't say it any different if if we
Speaker 1: knew Trump was about to be elected. You know what
Speaker 1: I mean. If he had won, we would have still
Speaker 1: made the same mini series. One of the guys who
Speaker 1: I really loved when I was a newspaper reporter was
Speaker 1: I have Stone. Is he Stone? Great independent voice in
Speaker 1: journalism for many many decades? Uh And in a good
Speaker 1: lefty at heart and um, Stone said something that I
Speaker 1: thought was very apt. He said, Um, sometimes the fights
Speaker 1: that you have that are where you know you can't
Speaker 1: win and you don't win, are the ones worth having.
Speaker 1: First of all, you know right is right, and don't
Speaker 1: say the wrong thing because you get to win. But
Speaker 1: second of all, maybe by you saying it and losing
Speaker 1: somewhere down the road, um, but you've created enough gravitas
Speaker 1: or enough momentum that somebody will take it to the
Speaker 1: next step and then eventually maybe somebody gets to win
Speaker 1: with it. And that's sort of That was a very
Speaker 1: prac cool distillation of something I read years ago from
Speaker 1: from Camu, I think in the Mythosisiphus, which was he said,
Speaker 1: you know, to have a to have a take on something,
Speaker 1: um or to fight for something. I'm trying. I'm really
Speaker 1: screwing up Camu here, but but I know exactly what
Speaker 1: the paragraph is basically said. You know, to commit to
Speaker 1: a just cause with the certainty of defeat is absurd,
Speaker 1: but to not commit to adjust cause because of the
Speaker 1: certainty of defeat is equally absurd. And only one of
Speaker 1: those choices um affords you the chance of human dignity.
Speaker 1: That's it, man, It's like you know, just because nobody
Speaker 1: listens to you doesn't mean the story changes. So you know,
Speaker 1: that's that's the way you gotta be if you're dealing
Speaker 1: with story time. Well, damn it, I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's an uplifting note on which to end or not
Speaker 1: to listen. Thank you ever so much for well, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you this. It's a note that it's a it's
Speaker 1: a note that I couldn't get out because my brains
Speaker 1: fried after talking for an hour after. We're gonna have
Speaker 1: to add Okay, listen, Thanks, thanks ever so much for
Speaker 1: joining man psychoactive, and I you know, more power to you,
Speaker 1: and I look forward to your next creations. Okay, take care.
Speaker 1: Thank you. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends
Speaker 1: about it, or you can write us a review at
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love
Speaker 1: to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share
Speaker 1: your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a
Speaker 1: message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty
Speaker 1: that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email
Speaker 1: us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or find me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Ethan Natalman. You can also find contact
Speaker 1: information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me
Speaker 1: Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by noah'm osband and Josh Stain.
Speaker 1: The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus
Speaker 1: and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt
Speaker 1: Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our
Speaker 1: music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to
Speaker 1: a Brio s F Bianca Grimshaw and Robert bb. Next
Speaker 1: week I'll be talking with Lady Amanda Fielding. She's the
Speaker 1: founder and head of the Beckley Foundation, which is the
Speaker 1: outstanding psychelic research institute in the United Kingdom. She's been
Speaker 1: described as the Queen of Consciousness. I actually have a
Speaker 1: particular love of L s D because of its purity.
Speaker 1: I think in a way, it's the most cognitively stimulating
Speaker 1: and it's the least toxic. So even when you take
Speaker 1: it reg lee for a while, when you come off it,
Speaker 1: you don't have a hangover, you don't have any craving.
Speaker 1: There's no aspect of addiction about it. And actually one
Speaker 1: needs more discipline to take it than not to take it.
Speaker 1: In a funny sort of way, it needs discipline to
Speaker 1: take it and work with it. Subscribe to Cycleactive now
Speaker 1: see it all, miss it