To me, the central thesis of Ethan Brown’s SNITCH is invaluable. If there is anything the well-informed liberal knows today about the War on Drugs, it’s that there is a sentencing disparity between powdered and crack cocaine that has massively disproportionate impact on blacks.

SNITCH gives us another “meme” to retain: the sleazy hood making up stories about someone else in order to avoid a long sentences, and then probably going out to wreak more havoc.

Good. But there are two other thoughts SNITCH leaves me with. First is that while I disagree with Prof. Kleiman that Brown seems in favor of the “Stop Snitchin’” movement, the cultural juice that the “Stop Snitchin” ethos currently has overlaps only partially with indignation over people indulging in “The 5K Game.”

The “Stop Snitchin’” T-shirts and such, including the phrase’s currency in rap music, do not only express disapproval of something as specific as people lying on others in order to get sentence reductions. “Stop Snitchin’” is also meant – and taken -- as a call for inner city people to not cooperate with the police at all.

The people who refuse to tell police what they know about murders taking place before their own eyes are not thinking about the Murder Inc. case or anything similar. The “Stop Snitchin’” phrase elicits cheers from audiences out of a general sentiment that the police are young black and brown people’s enemies. I attended a summit meeting between Bronx police and brown-skinned projects residents the other day, and kids as young as 14 were already imprinted with an antipathy towards the police who, in searching for drugs and drug dealers, regularly disperse and harrass innocent bystanders.

Besides this, what enforces the “Stop Snitchin’” ethos is fear: people refuse to identify murderers who they watched kill in cold blood because they would be killed in turn. Assessing in-house informers more effectively would not solve this problem: the same gangsters would impose the code of silence on innocent bystanders regardless of whether it became harder for a certain segment to play the “5K Game.”

Upon which I might venture: isn’t an informant system, no matter how well calibrated, dedicated to sniffing out who is trafficking in certain substances deemed illegal, the problem in itself?

So much discussion of the War on Drugs is conducted according to an assumption that this war, in some form, is an indisputably necessary keystone of the workings of American society. However, it is known by all that Prohibition was a failure, and only gave alcohol a cachet that made America more of a drinking nation than it was before.

Yet somehow, we are to take as a given that today’s Prohibition must be retained in some form. Is it because cocaine and heroin are more addictive than alcohol? Well, while that is true, what evidence do we have after decades of the War on Drugs that retaining a Prohibition-style policy has any significant effect regardless?

I take it that Brown’s book is intended as a call for reform of the War on Drugs. However, I read it as evidence that the entire operation needs to be blown sky high and we need to start again.

What if hard drugs were available legally and inexpensively? No need for informants to help get rid of gangs selling them at prices raised high due to the expense and risk involved in transporting illegal substances. No need to trawl around inner city neighborhoods annoying people looking for drugs or people selling them. And no more basis for a bone-deep anti-police sentiment which teaches inner city kids, who often have their most intense encounters with whites in the form of tense interactions with police officers, that the white world is alien and threatening, discouraging them from reaching beyond the lives they are born to.

Is this scenario utterly unworthy of engagement? Is the idea that sentencing guidelines need to be made gentler but still severe, and that there must remain a criminal justice system in which informers needing protection are a key component, rather like Congress legislating token emissions caps that will have no significant effect upon climate change?