The Wire & Legalization
March 19th, 2009 by frederickii
Like that middle aged Asian woman, I heart Bunny Colvin. At the American Scene, Matt Feeney has more nuanced things to say about Bunny’s drug legalization experiment:
But of course ending prohibition would have its substantial costs. The uptick in the direct effects – addiction etc. – is a matter of debate, but one thing The Wire shows pretty convincingly is that an end to drug prohibition would almost certainly lead to a huge expansion what James likes to call the pink police state. The Wire shows teams of public health types moving in to Hamsterdam to distribute needles and condoms and find as many takers for rehab as they can. What starts out as a threat to the experiment – people, inconveniently, pointing out how appalling are its tableaux – becomes the suggestion of a therapeutic utopia: The pleasure and the treatment and the policing of pleasure and treatment are all in one place, happening simultaneously. In real life, these public health types would be agents of the state. Drug legalization surely would lead to a spreading police power attached to the state’s therapeutic capacities.
