'30 Years of Failure': a conversation about the war on drugs with Ed Burns, cocreator of The Wire.

• Author: Balko, Radley
• Position: TV Against the Drug War: The Wire and the damage done, to Baltimore and to America - Interview

HBO's CRITICALLY acclaimed drama The Wire wrapped up its final season in March. The show has been widely praised for its raw and cynical realism, its huge cast of multidimensional characters interweaving across complex story arcs, and above all its knowing look at the decline of a major American city. Over five seasons, co-creators David Simon and Ed Burns--a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and a former narcotics officer with the Baltimore Police Department, respectively--explored Charm City's docks, labor unions, crumbling public school system, and troubled police department, along with the particular brand of political corruption that infects a dying city.

Although both are unreservedly men of the left, Simon and Burns created a show that eviscerated Democratic governance, capturing the futility and spectacular failure of local institutions. The Wire serves as a primer on unintended consequences, public choice theory, and the way politics poisons civil society. Characters showing even a hint of nobility are almost inevitably punished by indifferent, plodding bureaucrats, overly ambitious politicians, or the damaging actions of well-meaning public employees. The results can be heartbreaking, as when broken policies drive a promising circle of middle school students to bleak destinies.

The Wire's greatest accomplishment may be its unprecedented, painfully accurate portrait of the drug war. Never before has television so honestly captured the brutality of black markets, the folly of statistics-driven law enforcement, and the twisted incentives that confront cops and drug merchants alike. This may be why, as Simon told mason in 2004, the show is beloved by street-level police officers and drug dealers.

Ed Burns, 62, came to writing late in life, after a tour in Vietnam and two decades working homicide and narcotics in the Baltimore Police Department. He also taught seventh grade in Baltimore's public schools, an experience he has said compared psychologically with Vietnam. In 1997 Burns and Simon, who met when Simon was covering cops, cowrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, the acclaimed true story of a single inter section in drug-plagued West Baltimore that later became an Emmywinning HBO miniseries. In January of this year, as The Wire was closing out its run, Burns and Simon finished shooting a new HBO miniseries based on Evan Wright's book Generation Kill, an account of the first days of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

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Senior Editor Radley Balko interviewed Burns via telephone in February.

reason: This season of The Wire has focused pretty heavily on the media. What do you think the media do well when it comes to covering criminal justice issues, and what do you think they do poorly?

Ed Burns: I think a lot depends on who's doing it. In specific cases, you can do extremely well as a re porter. My problem is more with the basic philosophy of how it's done. It's like a laser beam. They cover a specific aspect, or a specific trial, or a specific murder in a way that simplifies things, that makes them very stereotypical. It only takes one sentence to name the victim of a crime and the street where the crime took place. So they're really only reporting something that we know is going to happen--because the conditions are there to make it happen--but they don't go beyond that. There's no context in crime reporting. That's the problem. reason: Mate's media critic, Jack Shafer, has said that the media are at their absolute worst when covering the drug war. Do you agree with him, and if so why do you think that is?

Burns: Take just the term "war on drugs." I mean, they're not warring on drugs. They're warring on drug addicts and the users and the small-time dealers. They're warring on neighborhoods. They're warring on people who can't stand up to them. They're not warring on major dealers.

You can follow it in any city; I don't care how small it is or how big...