Never mind the vomiting. For members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, drinking ayahuasca, a foul-tasting psychedelic tea brewed from two Amazonian plants, involves four hours of recitation, chanting, questions and answers, and religious instruction.

That may help explain why the church has only 130 or so followers in the U.S., despite the drug trips at the center of its rituals. But the federal government does not want to take the chance that Uniao do Vegetal, a synthesis of Christianity and indigenous South American beliefs that originated in Brazil, will do for ayahuasca what Timothy Leary did for LSD.

So in 1999, after intercepting a shipment of ayahuasca extract bound for Uniao do Vegetal's U.S. headquarters in Santa Fe, customs agents searched the home of the group's president, Jeffrey Bronfman, and seized 30 gallons of the tea. In a case the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear, the group's members are demanding that the government stop harassing them and start respecting their religious practices.

The Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration say ayahuasca is illegal because it contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is banned by the Controlled Substances Act. Uniao do Vegetal members say their use of ayahuasca is protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which prohibits the government from imposing a "substantial burden" on the free exercise of religion unless it is "the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest."

In 2002 a federal judge, concluding that Uniao do Vegetal was likely to win this argument, issued a preliminary injunction barring the government from interfering with the church's rites. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the injunction in 2003, and last year the full appeals court concurred.

For the Bush administration, which is big on religion but down on drugs, this case ought to pose a dilemma. RFRA, passed in 1993 with strong support from religious conservatives, was aimed at maximizing religious liberty by requiring the government to meet a stringent test when it prevents people of faith from acting on their beliefs.

The law was a response to a 1990 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom does not require the government to tolerate the peyote rituals of the Native American Church. While the First Amendment bars the government from deliberately targeting a specific religion, the Court said, it does not require exemptions from "neutral laws of general applicability" that happen to interfere with religious practices.

"To make an individual's obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law's coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State's interest is 'compelling'...contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia for the majority. "Any society adopting such a decision would be courting anarchy."

Notwithstanding Scalia's warning, Congress passed RFRA with the intent of restoring the "compelling interest" test the Court had applied before the peyote case. Although the Court ruled in 1997 that RFRA was unconstitutional as applied to the states, it still binds the federal government.

In a 2002 case that foreshadowed Uniao do Vegetal's fight for the right to drink ayahuasca, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit suggested that RFRA might protect possession (but not distribution) of marijuana by Rastafarians. No doubt that possibility gives drug warriors nightmares in which everyone arrested on marijuana charges claims to consider the plant a sacrament.

Yet it's not as if the idea of exempting religious groups from drug bans is unthinkable. The Volstead Act allowed Jews and Catholics to continue drinking wine as part of their rituals, and the federal government (like many states) lets members of the Native American Church eat peyote, the very practice that gave rise to the Supreme Court's abandonment of the "compelling interest" test. It's hard to see why ayahuasca rituals, which are officially pemitted in Brazil, are less tolerable.

Still, Scalia had a point: Religious beliefs cannot be a license to break the law. The government would never allow a religious group to commit murder because its god demanded human sacrifices. Then again, preventing murder is a pretty compelling interest, part of government's central mission to protect people from aggression.

A good rule of thumb might be that when a religious group can reasonably demand an exemption from a law, it's the law rather than the group that deserves scrutiny.

Here's how it works: An officer pulls you over because you're driving a bit too fast or a bit too slow, or because you have a broken tail light, or because you're not wearing your seat belt, or because you forgot to put your new registration sticker on your license plate. He is soon joined by another officer with a drug-sniffing dog, which "alerts" when it gets near your trunk.

Or so the officers say. You have no idea what this particular dog does when it smells contraband, and the dog isn't talking. But now the police can look in your trunk. A minor traffic stop is thus transformed into an embarrassing, invasive, intimidating, time-consuming search for illegal drugs.

The Supreme Court recently gave its approval to this sort of stop-and-switch in a case involving a man named Roy Caballes, who was pulled over on Interstate 80 by an Illinois state trooper for driving six miles an hour faster than the speed limit. Caballes happened to have 282 pounds of marijuana in his trunk, but even those of us who are not pot smugglers should worry that the Court saw nothing wrong with the circumstances that led to his arrest.

Trooper Daniel Gillette testified that he became suspicious because Caballes was well-dressed and seemed nervous, the car smelled of air freshener, and the only visible belongings were two sport coats, even though Caballes said he was moving from Las Vegas to Chicago. Gillette asked for permission to search the car, which Caballes, not surprisingly, declined to grant.

Gillette got permission from a dog instead. Trooper Craig Graham, upon hearing Gillette call in the stop, decided to swing by with a drug-sniffing canine, conveniently arriving just as Gillette was writing Caballes a warning ticket. For Caballes, one sniff by that dog was the difference between a warning and a 12-year prison sentence.

But according to the Supreme Court, the sniff was not a search. "A dog sniff conducted during a concededly lawful traffic stop that reveals no information other than the location of a substance that no individual has any right to possess does not violate the Fourth Amendment," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens for the six-member majority.

The decision built on a 1983 ruling that said "subjecting luggage to a 'sniff test' by a well-trained narcotics detection dog does not constitute a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment" because it "discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item." In other words, the only privacy interest it violates is a drug smuggler's desire to conceal his stash, which is not protected by the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures."

This argument is based on a myth. As Justice David Souter, one of two dissenters in Illinois v. Caballes, pointed out, "the infallible dog ... is a creature of legal fiction."

Souter cited examples from court cases of dogs with error rates of up to 38 percent. "Dogs in artificial testing situations return false positives anywhere from 12.5 to 60 percent of the time," he added.

In short, it is simply not true that a drug-sniffing dog "discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics." Even leaving aside the possibility of deliberate deception or honest error by police officers eager to turn a hunch into probable cause, the dogs themselves make mistakes, responding to subconscious cues from their handlers, alerting to food or residual odors of drugs that are no longer present, mistaking items associated with drugs for the drugs themselves, and so on.

Whatever the cause of a false alert, it exposes innocent people to the inconvenience and humiliation of drug searches they have done nothing to justify. Now that the Court has said police need no special reason to bring in the dogs, provided they are otherwise complying with the law, such searches will become more common, and they need not be limited to routine traffic stops.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the other dissenter in this case, warned that the Court's analysis "clears the way for suspicionless, dog-accompanied drug sweeps of parked cars along sidewalks and in parking lots," even of cars stopped at traffic lights. If you happen to be caught in such a dragnet, just keep telling yourself it's not really a search.

Last November, Weldon Angelos, a 24-year-old record company executive with no prior convictions, was sentenced to 55 years in federal prison for selling a pound and a half of marijuana to a government informant. The judge who imposed the sentence, Paul Cassell of the U.S. Court for the District of Utah, urged President Bush to commute it, calling it "unjust, cruel, and irrational."

The Supreme Court's recent decision restoring broad sentencing discretion to federal judges is expected to make this sort of situation, in which a judge agonizes over a draconian punishment he feels legally compelled to impose, less common. But the ruling, which made federal sentencing guidelines advisory rather than mandatory, does not help Angelos.

That's because his sentence was determined not by the guidelines but by statute. It is therefore perfectly constitutional under the Supreme Court's decision in U.S. v. Booker, which found that the guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury by lengthening sentences on the basis of facts determined by judges.

The ruling does not affect penalties prescribed by Congress for offenses that are admitted or proven to a jury, no matter how absurdly disproportionate the sentences are. In fact, one possible outcome of the decision is that we will see more such mandatory sentences, as tougher-than-thou members of Congress who thought judges were abusing what little discretion they had under the guidelines panic at the prospect of penalties determined by judicial whims.

The Angelos case suggests the dangers of that course. His 55-year sentence was dictated by a federal law that imposes extra punishment on people who commit felonies while carrying or using a gun: five years for the first offense and 25 years for each subsequent offense. Angelos, who completed three government-arranged marijuana sales, each involving about eight ounces, was convicted of having a pistol in an ankle holster during two of the sales; guns that police found in his home were the basis for a third conviction.

Angelos never used or even brandished his pistol, which he carried for self-protection. Yet as Judge Cassell noted, his punishment "is far in excess of the sentence imposed for such serious crimes as aircraft hijacking, second degree murder, espionage, kidnapping, aggravated assault, and rape."

If Angelos had been sentenced under the guidelines alone, the penalty range would have been roughly eight to 10 years. (Anticipating the Supreme Court's ruling in Booker, Cassell departed from the sentencing guidelines to give Angelos a one-day sentence for his other offenses.) If he had been convicted of the same offenses under Utah law, the prosecution estimated, Angelos would have ended up serving five to seven years.

Sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums were supposed to reduce unjust variations in punishment, making it more likely that similar defendants who committed similar crimes would receive similar penalties. But as this case shows, they can also cause unjust variations in punishment by making big sentencing differences hinge on which prosecutors (state or federal) bring charges and which charges they choose to bring.

Prosecutors initially told Angelos that if he pleaded guilty to marijuana distribution and one count of carrying a gun, they would recommend a sentence of 15 years. After he turned down that deal, they filed a new indictment with a total of 20 charges, including five gun offenses that by themselves exposed him to a mandatory minimum sentence of 105 years.

Mandatory minimums thus replace judicial discretion with prosecutorial discretion, which isn't necessarily better and is often worse, since prosecutors tend to aim for the most severe punishment they can get, whereas judges are supposed to take a more balanced approach. This does not mean there is no cause for concern about unconstrained judicial discretion, but Congress should also be aware of the injustice that results from giving prosecutors too much power, especially since the vast majority of federal cases are resolved by plea agreements.

The wisest approach at this point is to wait and see how the implications of Booker are worked out in the lower courts. While the sentencing guidelines are no longer mandatory, trial judges are still required to consider them, and appeals courts will be reviewing their sentencing decisions for "reasonableness."

Given the perils of excessively rigid sentencing rules, Congress should hesitate before creating new mandatory minimums. Instead it should revisit laws under which selling someone pot can trigger a more severe penalty than killing him.

The European Union's highest court recently upheld the E.U.'s 12-year-old ban on oral snuff, saying it serves "the objective of health promotion." Since cigarettes, a far more hazardous form of tobacco, are still legally available in Europe, the E.U.'s policy is rather like banning bows and arrows as an intolerable threat to public safety while allowing a free trade in machine guns.

Worse, tobacco consumption patterns in Sweden, the one E.U. country where oral snuff (known there as snus) remains legal, suggest that Eurocrats are contributing to smoking-related disease and death by foreclosing a safer alternative to cigarettes. As the vice president of Swedish Match, the leading snus producer, put it, "Snus is clearly a significantly less harmful product than cigarettes and could play an important role in a much more responsible harm reduction strategy than the current cynical Quit or Die approach."

Swedish Match obviously has a strong interest in reversing the oral snuff ban. But its position has a solid enough empirical basis that prominent European health researchers and a leading British anti-smoking activist likewise have decried the "Quit or Die approach."

In the U.S., where smokeless tobacco remains legal, this approach takes the form of a misinformation campaign that encourages people to think oral snuff is just as dangerous as cigarettes. That belief, which seems to be widely accepted by smokers, is clearly wrong.

Based on the incidence of tobacco-related deaths among users, University of Alabama at Birmingham oral pathologist Brad Rodu estimates that smokeless tobacco is 98 percent safer than cigarettes. The difference is so stark that public health officials have been forced to quietly retreat from their false risk equivalence.

Last year, for instance, Surgeon General Richard Carmona told a congressional subcommittee that "smokeless tobacco is not a safer substitute for cigarette smoking" – a claim that is scientifically unsupportable. But in the version of his testimony that appears on the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he says "smokeless tobacco is not a safe alternative to cigarettes" – the same true but misleading warning that appears on oral snuff packages.

Similarly, a CDC Web page aimed at children asks, "Is smokeless tobacco safe?" The answer: "No way!" But the search listing for the page shows that the question used to be, "Is smokeless tobacco safer than cigarettes?" I suspect the CDC's answer was not "You bet!"

Perhaps the most telling recent change in the official line on smokeless tobacco was made to a pamphlet published by the National Institute on Aging. When I looked at the online version of the pamphlet in March, it said: "Some people think smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco and snuff), pipes, and cigars are safer than cigarettes. They are not." The passage now reads: "Some people think smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco and snuff), pipes, and cigars are safe. They are not."

This change came in response to a March 16 complaint from the National Legal and Policy Center arguing that the pamphlet violated the Data Quality Act by disseminating erroneous information. Among other sources, the complaint quoted a 2001 report from the National Academy of Sciences that said "the overall risk [from smokeless tobacco] is lower than for cigarette smoking, and some products such as Swedish snus may have no increased risk" (because they're especially low in carcinogens).

The fact that public health officials seem less inclined to tell outright lies about smokeless tobacco is a small victory. They are still obscuring the issue by doggedly repeating that smokeless tobacco is not risk-free when the relevant point for a cigarette smoker who is thinking about switching is that it's much less likely to kill him than his current habit.

Meanwhile, their allies in the private sector, unconstrained by the Data Quality Act, continue to explicitly promote the myth that smokeless tobacco and cigarettes are equally dangerous. "Some people believe that using smokeless tobacco is safer than smoking," the American Cancer Society says on its Web site. "This is not true."

The staffer who wrote that might want to ask Michael Thun, the society's chief epidemiologist, for a copy of the December issue of ,i>Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. That issue includes a study in which a panel of experts estimated that the mortality risk posed by Swedish-style oral snuff is at least 90 percent lower than the risk posed by cigarettes. What makes me think Thun has a copy? He was one of the experts.

An online gourmet food shop calls its Maple Cream Cookies "truly delicious and addictive." In John Banzhaf's view, that description should be treated not as a selling point but as a warning.

Banzhaf, a George Washington University law professor who never saw a problem that couldn't be solved by suing someone, argues that food sellers have a legal duty to warn consumers about the dangerous deliciousness of high-calorie products such as ice cream, cheeseburgers, and potato chips. "Bet you can't eat just one!" presumably wouldn't count.

Banzhaf cites "growing evidence...that eating some fattening foods can cause addictive reactions in the brain just like nicotine," evidence he says is sufficient "to warrant at least a warning about possible addictive effects." He advises food companies that such warnings would help shield them from liability – very sporting of him, since he is a leading advocate of suing them for making people fat.

Banzhaf's latest evidence is an article in the December Psychology Today that likens overeating to drug addiction. "Like addicts," it says, "overeaters may be compensating for a sluggish dopamine system by turning to the one thing that gets their neurons pumping... It's a mark of changing times – and more sophisticated science – that the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse is thinking about doughnuts as well as heroin."

Perceiving a threat to personal responsibility, conservatives tend to reject such comparisons as outlandish exaggerations. Surely donuts – a familiar product that most of us consume in moderation, if at all – are nothing like heroin, which everyone knows is the most addictive drug around. (Except for crack. And methamphetamine. And nicotine.)

But such scoffing reflects a misunderstanding of drug addiction, which is neither inevitable nor inescapable. The government's own statistics indicate that the vast majority of people who use drugs – even such reputedly powerful substances as heroin and crack – never become addicts. Those who do often manage to stop or moderate their use. There are about as many former smokers in this country as smokers, for example, and they typically quit without formal "treatment."

It's hard to deny the parallels between overeating and drug addiction: People find eating pleasurable, often eat more than they initially intend, regret their overeating, and have trouble cutting back to lose weight despite the health risks and social costs of being fat. Most striking is the ambivalence, the conflict between short-term and long-term interests that creates the appearance that people want to change their behavior but can't.

The mistake lies in accepting that appearance at face value. People do, after all, shed pounds when their reasons for eating less outweigh their desire to eat more. Just as important, people can avoid overeating in the first place, no matter how "truly delicious and addictive" the food they encounter.

By focusing on brain scans and analogies to drugs widely (though wrongly) believed to be irresistible, activists like Banzhaf obscure the possibility of self-control. As the psychiatrist Sally Satel observed at a 2003 conference on obesity, "virtually every pleasure we encounter is associated with surges in dopamine," and brain images "cannot distinguish between an irresistible impulse and an impulse that is not resisted."

Yet anti-vice crusaders continue to cite such research as evidence that people cannot reasonably be expected to control themselves, and the tendency is not limited to activists on the left. At a recent hearing convened by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Judith Reisman of the California Protective Parents Association testified that "pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the 'high' from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erotoxins."

In Reisman's telling, the conscious mind plays no role in people's reactions to pornography. She called the effects of sexually explicit material "brain sabotage," warning that "pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process."

This is the sort of choice-negating reductionism, leaving no room for tastes, values, or learning, that conservatives usually reject when it comes to, say, fast food ads. All experiences "imprint and alter the brain." That fact tells us nothing about how people respond to those experiences – whether with disgust or enthusiasm, moderation or excess.

Reisman and other critics of pornography say it's dehumanizing, reducing people to genitals. The same could be said of a behavioral theory that looks at people and sees only biochemicals.

Prosecutors say McLean, Virginia physician William Hurwitz, who is on trial at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, knowingly supplied OxyContin and other narcotic painkillers to patients who sold them on the black market. "A self-proclaimed healer, he crossed the line to dealer," Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Lytle declared in his opening statement. "He thought he could hide behind the pain he treated."

When Hurwitz was indicted last fall, U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty called him a "major and deadly drug dealer." Charged with 62 counts related to what prosecutors describe as a multistate drug trafficking conspiracy, Hurwitz faces a possible life sentence.

Yet the details of the government's case do not fit the picture it has tried to paint. Instead, they suggest that if Hurwitz is guilty of anything, it's inadequate skepticism and excessive compassion. By prosecuting him for trusting his patients too much, the government is criminalizing the sort of mistake doctors already are so keen to avoid that they routinely turn away or undertreat patients in pain.

Over the years Hurwitz has acquired a reputation as one of the rare doctors brave enough to prescribe for patients with severe chronic pain the high doses of opioids they need to make their lives bearable. Inevitably, such a doctor will attract people who want narcotics to get high or to sell them on the street.

The government does not dispute that Hurwitz has helped hundreds of desperate patients who unsuccessfully sought pain relief from doctors who were afraid to risk unwanted attention from the government by treating them. But it faults him for "willful blindness" in prescribing "obscene amounts of pills" to patients who were selling or abusing them, including three who took overdoses.

A former patient called as a prosecution witness testified that "I had a lot of pain, but I exaggerated it, trying to get the drugs." On cross-examination, he added that he had "played a lot of doctors" over the years. He characterized Hurwitz as naive, saying: "He was concerned about me and my wife [also a patient]. Dr. Hurwitz is always concerned."

Such testimony does not make Hurwitz look like a drug trafficker. It makes him look like a sincere healer duped by tricky patients. Although prosecutors portray Hurwitz as a drug kingpin, they have no evidence that he received any money from drug sales. Instead, they say he profited by charging patients for his care.

Prosecutors cite Hurwitz's detailed medical records to support their allegation that "he prescribed incredibly large amounts of narcotics, well outside the boundaries of proper medicine." But as Patrick Hallinan, one of Hurwitz's attorneys, noted, "These medical records are in stone. You think someone involved in a scam selling pills would put it down in the records?"

That does not necessarily mean that every aspect of Hurwitz's practice was beyond reproach. But by threatening to imprison doctors for being less suspicious than the Drug Enforcement Administration thinks they should have been, the government puts the fear of pain patients into even the most scrupulous physicians.

Russell Portenoy, a prominent pain expert, warns that a conviction in this case would have a "strong chilling effect" on pain treatment. "I have a very profound concern," he told the Washington Post, "that the appropriate way to deal with these issues is not through criminal prosecution but through an evaluation of medical practice."

In this connection, it's significant that the Virginia Board of Medicine, reviewing allegations similar to those underlying the Justice Department's case, chose not to revoke Hurwitz's license but to place him on probation. It's also telling that when federal investigators discovered that some of Hurwitz's patients were selling the drugs he prescribed, they chose to build a case against him rather than alert him to the diversion they supposedly were trying to prevent.

"In this particular area," Hurwitz told the Post before his indictment, "doctors are expected to have perfect knowledge of everything a patient does. That presumption is invalid. Nobody could treat pain if they're going to hold doctors to that standard."

In a pamphlet published last August, the DEA conceded that "any physician can be duped"; that it's hard to distinguish between addicts and patients in pain; and that prescriptions that look suspicious to the government may be perfectly justified. The pamphlet disappeared from the DEA's website last month, a few weeks after Hurwitz's attorneys tried to introduce it as evidence in his trial.

On Sept. 19 an often-overlooked gem returned to HBO. "The Wire," entering its third season, is sometimes described as a Baltimore-based crime show, but that's a little misleading. It's a show about cops and criminals, but it doesn't follow any genre formulas. It does not wrap up a case every hour, has no clear-cut heroes and few clear-cut villains, and is willing to explore the ways that life in the middle of a police hierarchy and life in the middle of a criminal syndicate might produce the same frustrations.

At the center of "The Wire" is creator-producer-writer David Simon, 44, a veteran of the Baltimore Sun who rose to national prominence with his 1991 book "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets." The product of 12 months immersed in the Baltimore homicide unit, it was quickly acclaimed as a classic of contemporary journalism and soon inspired a TV series, NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Street" (1993-1999). Simon's next book, "The Corner" (1997), was written with retired detective Edward Burns; it was the product of another year-long immersion, this time in a West Baltimore neighborhood ravaged by the drug trade and the drug war. It too made a mark on the small screen, as an HBO miniseries in 2000.

Simon had a hand in each program – he co-wrote "The Corner" and wrote several episodes of "Homicide" – but he didn't build a television series from scratch until he and Burns launched "The Wire" in 2002. Though with "The Wire," even the phrase "television series" is somewhat misleading. Each season is more like a 13-hour film, or a 13-chapter novel, that grows steadily more engrossing as it unfolds.

Last year the program explored corruption on the waterfront, with the tale of a union official who dealt with criminals not to feather his own nest but to reverse the declining fortunes of the port, with terrible results; the story was closer in spirit to a classical tragedy than a police procedural. The program's other major story line centers around the West Baltimore drug trade, with battles between gangs for territory and within them for status and power. It sometimes feels like one of Shakespeare's history plays, if there is a history play that looks without flinching at the bankruptcy of the drug war, the intersection between crime and politics, and the day-to-day deprivations of inner-city poverty.

We spoke with Simon in July 2004, as production for the third season drew to a close.

Would you describe The Wire as a cynical show?

David Simon: It's cynical about institutions, and about their capacity for serving the needs of the individual. But in its treatment of the actual characters, be they longshoremen or mid-level drug dealers or police detectives, I don't think it's cynical at all. I think there's a great deal of humanist affection.

The Wire draws heavily on Ed Burns' experiences as a policeman. But though you cast yourself as a reporter in one episode, there hasn't been an inside-the-job look at a journalist's life. Is that something you're thinking about doing in the future?

We might glance at it a little bit. One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage.

I think if you look at what journalism has achieved in terms of parsing the events that got us into this war in Iraq, or the truth about what happened in the election – I've become increasingly cynical about the ability of daily journalism to effect any kind of meaningful change. I was pretty dubious about it when I was a journalist, but now I think it's remarkably ineffectual.

Do you think you can raise that kind of outrage with a TV show?

I don't. The Wire will have an effect on the way a certain number of thoughtful people look at the drug war. It will not have the slightest effect on the way the nation as a whole does business. Nor is that my intent in doing the show. My intent is to tell a good story that matters to myself and the other writers – to tell the best story we can about what it feels like to live in the American city.

What's the show's underlying message about the drug war?

That it's a fraud. It's all over except for the tragedy and the shouting and the wasted lives. That'll continue. But the outcome has never been in doubt.

I've seen one writer citing The Corner to make the case that the drug war needs to be fought harder

What idiot was that?

His name was Eli Lehrer. [Lehrer said the book "vividly describes just how bad life became in a typical inner-city neighborhood" after Baltimore's then-Mayor Kurt Schmoke came out for a less punitive approach to the drug war. In fact, Schmoke's police department locked up more people for drug crimes than any previous administration.] He was writing in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine.

Ed Burns and I spoke at one of those groups. There came this point where a guy said, "Well, what is the solution? Give me the paragraph; give me the lede. What's the solution, if not drug prohibition?"

I very painstakingly said: "Look. For 35 years, you've systematically deindustrialized these cities. You've rendered them inhospitable to the working class, economically. You have marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade. Then you've alienated them further by fighting this draconian war in their neighborhoods, and not being able to distinguish between friend or foe and between that which is truly dangerous or that which is just illegal. And you want to sit across the table from me and say 'What's the solution?' and get it in a paragraph? The solution is to undo the last 35 years, brick by brick. How long is that going to take? I don't know, but until you start it's only going to get worse."

And the guy looked at me and went, "But what's the solution?" He said it again. Ed Burns restrained me.

You've suggested that the third season is going to look at political reform.

Reform of all kinds. Political reform, reform within the department, reform within the drug trade. Reform is the theme.

You'll see a political component. But the theme of reform is not just political. There will be several characters who will present themselves as potential reformers. Some of them actually will be reformist, and some of them will not. Part of the season, from the viewer's perspective, is figuring out who's who.

What kind of reaction does the show get from the police?

I thought we'd get a bad reaction, because it clearly is very down on the drug war. In the middle of the first season, after it was clear what the tone of the show was, I went to the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police] lodge off of 41st Street [in Baltimore]. I basically was going to say, "OK, I'm ready to take everybody's shit. What do you have to say?" And they just kept reciting scenes back to me that had made them laugh, that felt real to them.

Ed was a cop for 20 years. I covered that world for 13. We didn't get the shit wrong. A lot of the guys knew the stuff we were referring to, the cases that we were stealing from.

Have you gotten any reaction from the local criminal community?

They like it. Around the courthouse, there's a hilarious wiretap of people on a Monday talking about the Sunday night episode. I was dying to get ahold of it, but it never became public – most wiretap stuff doesn't, unless it's brought into evidence.

How does your experience doing The Wire compare to your experience doing Homicide?

HBO's a lot smarter than NBC. They can afford to be. They don't care if you're watching every show on HBO. If you're a subscriber and you're only getting it for two shows out of 10, they've still got your $17.95. And therein lies all the difference.

That's a model that can't exist in network TV because of the need to present the maximum number of viewers to advertisers. That leads to decisions about story, character, and theme on network TV that are just destructive. They were destructive on Homicide. Compromises had to be made.

What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you're in it.

In a country that has long been cuckoo for catch phrases -- from "Give me liberty or give me death" to "I want my Maypo" to "Whassuupp" -- it's hardly surprising that 9/11 would generate a quasi-official slogan. Or that it would be "Let's roll!," the last known words of Todd Beamer, the most widely recognized hero-victim of the terrorist attacks.

Despite its relative inscrutability, "Let's roll!" -- Beamer's signature phrase, heard by a GTE phone operator who'd been in contact with him during the doomed flight -- somehow summed up the courage of the brave souls who mounted a revolt against the hijackers on United Flight 93. By causing the plane to crash in a field in western Pennsylvania rather than some likely target in Washington, D.C., Beamer and his fellow passengers saved dozens or hundreds of lives even as they gave up their own.

Yet as soon as a phrase -- especially a heartfelt and serious one -- is uttered, it immediately starts morphing into something else, typically a parodic version of itself. When's the last time anyone uttered "Ich bin ein Berliner," "I am not a crook," or "I've fallen and I can't get up" as something other than a punch line? "Let's roll!" is itself taking on an increasingly curious afterlife as the specifics of 9/11 recede from public memory.

Ironically, it's the phrase's official guardians who are transforming "Let's roll!" into a generalized "lifestyle" statement. Earlier this year, the Todd M. Beamer Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Beamer's widow, raised eyebrows when it trademarked the slogan, both to control its usage and to raise money for programs that "seek ... to equip children experiencing family trauma to make heroic choices every day." But the foundation has done more than just sell its own "Let's roll!" paraphernalia as a fund raising tool. It's pursued a series of odd licensing choices that strain the credulity of even the least cynical observers.

In June, for instance, the foundation let Wal-Mart use the phrase as an employee motivation slogan and as a theme for its annual shareholder meeting. "It's an inspirational use of 'Let's Roll,'" Beamer Foundation CEO Douglas A. MacMillan suggested to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reiterating that the words are "a call to action."

In August the foundation gave its blessing to Florida State University's football team, which has slapped "Let's roll!" on T-shirts, baseball caps, and other items. Each year legendary coach Bobby Bowden selects a theme for the season. "We are going to go with 'Let's roll,' based on the airplane guy making that remark," Bowden churlishly explained on the FSU Web site (in Bowden's defense, one of the things he is legendary for is forgetting names). "Not only for that but the season is here, the challenges are here, let's roll."

Rather than distancing the Beamer Foundation from a tasteless equation of the struggle on Flight 93 with college football, MacMillan embraced it. "By picking that phrase, Coach Bowden is carrying on Todd's legacy," he said, adding, "Todd was a huge sports fan. I'm sure he's thrilled."

Maybe, maybe not. He's probably more excited by the latest product to prominently feature the slogan: the book "Let's Roll!: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage" (Tyndale), by his widow, Lisa Beamer, and Ken Abraham. Despite many truly odd touches -- Abraham is identified on the jacket as a "professional writer with world-class credentials" and the coauthor of a biography of golfer Payne Stewart, who also died in an airplane crash -- "Let's Roll!" is mostly a touching memoir, especially the section that uses multiple sources to reconstruct the grim struggle aboard Flight 93. Yet the book is at its weakest precisely when it invokes its vague and overused catch phrase -- "'Let's roll!' is not a slogan, a book, or a song; it's a lifestyle," insists Beamer at one point -- rather than poignant human details.

Exactly what "Let's roll!" will come to mean over the years is anyone's guess, though we can safely assume its final iteration will be an odd subversion of its original referent. "Remember the Alamo!," despite its imperative demand for historical consciousness, actually started out as but half of a slogan urging Texans in their war with Mexico to "Remember Goliad!," another infamous massacre. "In like Flynn," now a generic term for ease of entry, originated among G.I.s wryly referencing the screen legend Errol Flynn's 1942 trial for statutory rape.

"Let's roll!" may well go down as Florida State's great rallying cry, or a mantra mumbled by especially motivated Wal-Mart sales associates. That won't be so bad, assuming that we remember the heroes on Flight 93 for what they did, not just what they said.

Nick Gillespie is Reason's editor-in-chief. This article is reprinted with permission, and is not available for syndication or redistribution.

When the military prepares for action, the public debate is usually a simple either/or: Will there be peace, or will there be war? Not so now.

Fresh from the bloody assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there are at least six choices before us, each with its own subgenres and mutant variations. None is perfect, and one is actually insane. But each is worth examining, if only to understand what people actually mean when they call for war, peace, or some other path they can't quite articulate.

Here, then, are our choices, beginning with the least violent and ending with the most:

1. The Gandhi Option

Some favor no military response to the attacks at all. In its flaky form, this position involves wishing really hard, perhaps while holding someone's hand, that hatred and violence will disappear from the world. Not every pacifist is so naive, though, and there is a more sophisticated case for military inaction.

This argument points out that terrorists do not come from nowhere. They respond to particular policies of the country under attack. If, as the evidence suggests, the assault was masterminded by Osama bin Laden or his allies, then it may well be easier to adjust our foreign policy than to hunt down every terrorist in the Middle East, especially since that hunt might inspire yet more Middle Easterners to turn to terrorism. Wouldn't it make more sense just to stop these clumsy interventions into other people's battles? Why make ourselves a target for every tin-pot maniac in the Third World?

A variation on this argument notes that many of our present foes -- including Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein -- were originally built up by the United States to fight the enemies of an earlier day. One can only wonder what our allies in a new war might do to us several years later.

There are two problems with the Gandhi option. The first relates not so much to the position itself as to some of the people who have been advancing it. Obsessed with finding what "we" might have done to "deserve" this -- as though anyone deserves to die this way -- the hairshirt faction has conjured a list of sins far removed from anything that could have inspired the attacks. When the filmmaker Michael Moore speculated about the terrorists' motives, for example, his rambling ruminations touched on missile defense, America's withdrawal from the Durban conference on racism, and even our rejection of the Kyoto accords on global warming. Evidently, Moore believes that we are being attacked by European diplomats.

In the real world, we are being attacked by a group that -- judging from the fatwah issued by Osama bin Laden in 1998 -- objects to America's military presence in Saudi Arabia, to its sanctions against Iraq, and to its support for Israel. The point of reexamining U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the attacks is not to find everything about it that you might want to change, from Star Wars to Kyoto. It is to find the parts that might be putting us in danger, even if you've supported them until now. In the next few months, a lot of Israel's American supporters will be wrestling with a difficult choice: Israel's security, or their own? Many will choose the latter.

The other problem with Gandhianism goes deeper. Watching the World Trade Center towers collapse last week, desperately aware that thousands of people were inside them, most Americans did not merely crave greater security. They wanted justice. If nothing is done to capture the people responsible for that atrocity, it will be hard to claim that justice has been done.

2. The Kojak Option

And so we come to option two. A terrible crime has been committed. The immediate perps are now dead, but the conspirators behind them are alive and free. They may be plotting further, even worse assaults. We still aren't sure who they are or where they are, but we have some significant leads. So it's time for some expert policework, to track down and capture the people who did this.

The advantage to this approach is that it meets the demand for a response while keeping that response targeted at the criminals. As such, it upholds justice in two ways: by meting it out to the murderers who killed 5,000 people in one day, and by refusing to replicate their crime by killing anyone unfortunate enough to live in the same country as the terrorists.

There are two disadvantages. One of them I'll describe later, as it undermines the next two alternatives as well. The other is that, in tracking terrorists through the mountains of central Asia, it won't be easy to stick to all the legal niceties that policemen are supposed to observe. And if it comes down to letting the likely culprits escape or abandoning due process, most Americans will choose the latter. At the very least, they will say, let us consider response three:

3. The Bronson Option

If we cannot be policemen, let us be vigilantes. We could still limit ourselves to hunting the perpetrators, taking care to leave innocent civilians out of the fight. But we won't have to prove their guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, we could combine the goals of a policeman with rules more akin to those of war. (Some libertarian variations on this idea call for literal vigilantism, with privateers rather than soldiers leading the fight.)

If a foreign government turns out to be involved in plotting the attack, then it isn't merely the rules of war that might be invoked. A violent attack on the U.S. by another state would land us in response four:

4. The Bugs Bunny Option

This one's named for the great American who, when attacked, routinely remarks, "Of course you realize this means war."

This would be a limited war, aimed not at "rooting out terrorism" but at treating those terrorists who are affiliated with foreign governments the same as those who are independent agents. As with Bronsonism and Kojakism, it limits its fire to the conspirators and their henchmen, leaving civilians spared. If you're looking to bomb cities or occupy Afghanistan, you'll have to go well beyond Bugs.

These last three responses share a problem. If the Gandhi option addresses the question of security while leaving justice undone, the others aim for justice but leave us insecure. Arrest or kill Osama bin Laden, and his lieutenants will take over his war. Capture them, and other branches of his very loose network will step into the breach. Bring down a government, and heaven knows what might take its place.

And that brings us to the biggest decision. Do we defend ourselves against this attack, whatever that entails, and then withdraw from the Middle East, fusing a rigorous and vigorous self-defense with non-intervention in other nations' affairs? Or do we dig in for a long fight against the social landscape of the Mideast? Do we, in the words of The New York Times' Thomas Friedman, fight "a long, long war" against "all the super-empowered angry men and women out there"?

5. The Caesar Option

If you prefer this alternative -- if you favor a long war against a ubiquitous enemy -- then be aware of the likely consequences:

- The war will not merely be long. It will be perpetual. We will not be fighting an army, after all, but a tactic -- terrorism -- that can be adopted by small cells anywhere in the world. More: We will be fighting a mindset, one which will probably be inflamed still further by the battle against it. We will never know when the war is over, or when we're finally safe. Innocent civilians will die -- not just abroad, but here (as if we needed to be reminded) in America.

- The U.S. will become a garrison state. When you're fighting a perpetual war against an enemy that operates without borders, citizens will become suspects. Privacy, due process, freedom of association, and freedom of movement will be curtailed. Given politicians' predilections, the same fate will likely befall free speech and the right to bear arms.

- Whatever authoritarian measures afflict us domestically will be meted out several times over to states abroad, since that will be where most of the actual terrorists live. Dictatorship, of course, is nothing new in the Middle East. But now the governments will be answering to the United States, which can scarcely trust the Taliban to do its terrorist-hunting for it. America will have to act forthrightly as an empire.

In short, the Caesar option will probably fail to bring us security or justice. The only way around this would be not just to dominate the potential terrorists of the Middle East, but to wipe them out. Incredibly, there are those who are proposing just this.

6. The Strangelove Option

Not long after the attacks, Sam Donaldson asked the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, whether we can "rule out" the use of nuclear weapons. He received this response:

"We have an amazing accomplishment that's been achieved on the part of human beings. We've had this unbelievably powerful weapon, nuclear weapons, since, what, 55 years now plus, and it's not been fired in anger since 1945. That's an amazing accomplishment. I think it reflects a sensitivity on the part of successive presidents that they ought to find as many other ways to deal with problems as is possible."

"I'll have to think about your answer," said Donaldson. "I don't think the answer was no."

"The answer was that that we ought to be very proud of the record of humanity that we have not used those weapons for 55 years," replied Rumsfeld. "And we have to find as many ways possible to deal with this serious problem of terrorism."

Where Rumsfeld weasels, others step boldly. "At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan," Thomas Woodrow, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency, declared in The Washington Times. In the pundit class the talk is even nastier, with Col. David Hackworth among others suggesting that portions of the Middle East should "glow" with radiation.

Maybe they're just bluffing. Maybe they're just trying to convince the world that Americans are batshit crazy when we're mad, and that the terrorists damn well better be scared. The trouble is, they're scaring me too.

* * *

So which path do we take?

I've long opposed American intervention abroad. Self-defense, however, is an entirely different matter. Obviously, the Kojak model is ideal, but I can live with Bronson or Bugs. The important point is to aim our fire at the murderers, not at civilians or at anyone who merely happens to be a usual suspect -- and to limit ourselves to a well-defined mission, rather than a vague, all-encompassing "war on terrorism." The Caesar option would lead to further tragedy; the Strangelove path, to utter disaster.

At the same time, we will have to take a hard look at what the pacifists are saying, even if we reject absolute nonviolence. Do we really want to defend a fundamentalist dictatorship in Saudi Arabia? Do we really need to maintain sanctions that have had no effect on Saddam's dictatorship, but have brought death to thousands of Iraqi children? And in that most contentious of Mideastern conflicts, must we tilt so strongly toward Israel, even when it treats Palestinians like second-class citizens or winks at those who steal their water and land? (Spare me your angry e-mails, Israeli partisans: I don't think much of Arafat's brutal Palestinian National Authority either.) This isn't just an issue to grapple with after bin Laden has been captured or killed. It's something to look at now, as we figure out how to fight the terrorists without alienating the Middle Eastern public.

Never before has America's involvement in the Mideast's tribal politics seemed more foolhardy. Now that we're stuck in this tarbaby, we're going to have to fight our way out. But we should think twice before punching any more tarbabies down the road.

Jesse Walker (jwalker@reason.com) is an associate editor of Reason Magazine and the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).