Brian Carlo

Life Imitates Art. Sort Of.

It’s no secret that I think “The Wire” is the best television ever made. I’ve been rewatching it (again) as another one of my roommates has gotten hooked on the series. Which is why I was delighted to read about “Vancouver’s Radical New Approach To Drugs: Let Junkies Be Junkies.” Sounds awfully similar to Hamsterdam from “The Wire,” fictional areas of inner city West Baltimore filled with vacant houses where dealers were corralled away from the neighborhoods they were destroying and allowed to freely distribute drugs. All as long as they kept in the “free zones.”

In reality, what Vancouver is trying in response to drug addicts is far more groundbreaking and involved. Sure, they’ve decriminalized marijuana. But they’ve also set up sites where addicts can get free, clean paraphernalia, shoot up with the help of medical staff, and in some cases even get free drugs themselves. Any fan of “The Wire” has to respect an alternative approach to the war on drugs here in the U.S. Still, reading about the Vancouver police’s role in all this, I couldn’t help but think of Bunny Colvin getting chewed out at Comstat after telling his bosses he had effectively legalized drugs.

Let’s hope Vancouver’s plan doesn’t descend into chaos like Hamsterdam.

via the Ideas blog.

BONUS COVERAGE: Check out another link from the Ideas blog to the New Scientist, which explains why our tendency to go to war, and why males tend to form bonds together to hate other groups of males, might be an evolutionary response. This explains why all my college buddies and I hate Duke and Carolina so much.