Reason‘s Damon Root writes about John McWhorter’s list of books on race that should receive more attention. He highlights a quote about Ethan Brown’s Snitch:
If there were no War on Drugs, I sincerely believe that within a single generation, there would be no perceptible “crisis in black America,” and this book shows much of why that’s true. The War on Drugs turns whole neighborhoods against the cops—with no discernible benefit after more than 30 years. Brown’s book is very The Wire–except the people he writes about are real.
and then recalls a quote from Wire co-creator David Simon:
For 35 years, you’ve…marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade. Then you’ve alienated them further by fighting this draconian war in their neighborhoods, and not being able to distinguish between friend or foe and between that which is truly dangerous or that which is just illegal.
I like this quote from David Simon better:
The Wire will have an effect on the way a certain number of thoughtful people look at the drug war. It will not have the slightest effect on the way the nation as a whole does business.
Some people like to say that the way you change policy isn’t to study policy analysis, but to make a movie instead.
But we often observe only one side of the experimental condition: those cases where a specific media message changed policy. What about all those movies on the War on Drugs? Not a lot of policy change so far.
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