“What drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has”: ‘David Simon, creator of the searing new HBO series “The Wire,” on why even the best cop shows are phony and our anti-drug mania amounts to a permanent war against the underclass… HBO’s new series “The Wire” is as much a polemic against the drug war as it is an indictment against traditional cop-show conventions.’

What’s behind the basic plot of “The Wire”?

It’s very loosely based on the experiences of my co-writer, Ed Burns, who was a 20-year veteran of the police department here in Baltimore. He did a lot of these protracted investigations, often of more than a year’s time, into violent drug traffickers. It was largely based on his experiences and his frustrations in the department. And then it was also based on my experiences at my newspaper, which became a sort of hellish, futile bureaucracy. And then while we were writing the scripts, Enron was happening. And the Catholic Church. It became more of a treatise about institutions and individuals than a straight cop show.

Like “The Corner,” “The Wire” deals with the drug epidemic in Baltimore. Why do you keep coming back to this subject and this city?

I’ve lived in Baltimore coming up on 20 years. I know it. I actually went to the mayor and told him, “This is gonna be a pretty bleak show. If you’re sick of this shit, we’ll take our business elsewhere.” But to his credit, he said, Do it. Baltimore is one of the most drug-involved cities in the country. It has been for years. The police department we’re portraying is not particularly exaggerated for the late ’80s, early ’90s. It was that dysfunctional. [More] Salon