Hamsterdam
As life imitates art, Josh Russell says it’s about time we called a ceasefire on the ‘War on Drugs’
It’s late at night. Drug users roam the streets. Dealers push their products; a persistent call and response of street names yelled like the banter of twisted market criers. Children run around at waist height, trying to scavenge whatever they can. A fight breaks out, uninterrupted by onlookers. Wasted addicts are visible in every doorway; babies cry, their mother’s oblivious. The area is poorly managed; a lack of social support and community policing has reduced these few blocks to a private hell. It is one of the city’s new decriminalised zones.
Whilst this is perhaps the image that comes to mind for some when we talk of decriminalisation, more avid TV fans may recognise it as a scene from the third season of HBO’s excellent series The Wire. In the programme, tired by the losing struggle against drug dealers in his district, a Major Howard Colvin decides to act under his own initiative, putting into place zones where dealing will be tolerated. His officers encourage pushers to move away from residential corners into uninhabited safe zones that are dubbed locally as ‘Hamsterdam’, allowing the district police to focus on the violence associated with the drugs trade.
In a bizarre twist of fate, the UK Drug Policy Commission has announced in the last week that ‘smarter’ tactics are needed to reduce the harm that the drugs trade has on our society, tactics that bear a striking resemblance to David Simon’s critically acclaimed series.i It seems to be another case of life imitating art but the question that must be asked is can the reality be sweeter than the fiction?
