All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

There’s this wonderful line from a theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who got it in his head—he was a German—to leave England in 1944 to come back to confront Hitler. He was [executed] two weeks before the end of the war. He has this line, he says, “If you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle backward is not a solution. You have to get off the train.” We created these programs, back in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, that were the wrong programs. That’s our train, and we tinker with them, but the problem’s way back there and we’re not getting off the train. There’s this whole idea of the war on drugs. I mean, that is our longest war, and that war has more casualties than all other wars combined. We keep doing the same stupid things, and our great hope is that, now [that] white people are dying of heroin, [that] they might do something, which they won’t. That’s the thing. We’re not willing to get off of that train because we’re all experts on the train.