Don't Try Too Hard to Think, Don't Think at All

Congratulations to the person who posted anonymously this afternoon at 3:07 for correctly naming "A Pirate Looks at 40" by Jimmy Buffett as the Wednesday Song of the Day. Anonymous, if you wish to receive the plaudits and accolades that accompany a victory in the Song of the Day contest, you know where to find me.

Update:The aforementioned mystery man/woman was in fact Mr. Jacob George Straub. Yes, your friend and mine, Chicago. Congratulations, sir.

HBO's landmark series "The Wire" will air its final episode this Sunday, March 9th. Before the show leaves the airwaves, at least until syndication, the writers of the show decided to share a very interesting, and thought provoking, message with their audience.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

"The Wire's War on the Drug War" by Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and David Simon.