Love is what transforms ...
The HCLU's video interview with Sonja Sohn - the actress who played Kima Greggs in The Wire
The Wire has been described by many critics as the greatest television series ever made and it has been praised for its realistic portrayal of urban life - especially the war on drugs. The HCLU video advocacy team are definiteley great fans of the show - just as the TNI team. One of our favourite characters was Detective Kima Greggs. Sonja Sohn - the actress who played Kima - attended the 8th National Harm Reduction Conference in Austin, Texas organized by the Harm Reduction Coalition, where she was so kind to give an interview to HCLU.
Sonja Sohn founded the ReWIRED for Change - an outreach program intended to communicate with (and ultimately rehabilitate) at-risk youth involved in criminal activity. This program has been using the TV show as a teaching tool to examine and query their lives and past actions. In addition to being a great actress she is wonderful person who transforms her environment with her kindness and love.
Members of the writing staff of The Wire wrote an OpEd in Time Magazine three years ago, The Wire's War on the Drug War, denouncing the drug war. They announced that "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."
Recently, the authors said they were prepared to go to work on season six of The Wire if the Department of Justice would be equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of the misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition in the US. The US government's war on drugs is nothing more or less than a war on our underclass, according to them, succeeding only in transforming our democracy into the "jailingest" nation on the planet. Read: The nonsense of a 'War on Drugs': The Wire's writers get it, governments consistently don't.
For more videos on drug policy issues visit the Hungarian Civil Liberty Union (HCLU) website.
