Tonight my son Lex and I went to screening and talkback on campus at USC. The guest was David Simon, executive producer and creator of “The Wire,” which we are sad is ending its five-season run next Sunday.

As LA Times television critic Howard Rosenberg noted in his introduction, “The Wire” is far too complicated to synopsize easily, but if you haven’t watched the show, let’s just say it’s about the long-ranging and wide-reaching implications of the war on drugs and all the institutions it touches. It is not a show that an optimist could embrace.

Admidst talk of the show’s themes, Simon recounted the latest statistics on our country’s prison industrial complex: 1 in 100 people in this country are in prison, 1 in 9 black men in this country are in prison, 1 in 4 black men are in some way under the aegis of the enforcement or corrections. We are the most imprisoned people in history.

It’s the war on drugs that has gotten us here.

“No politician in our lifetime will touch this,” he said, “Not Obama, not Clinton, not McCain. The only thing that will end it is massive civil disobedience.”

His plan is this: That if he ever winds up on a jury in a drug case where no one was harmed, he plans to vote not guilty. If asked, he’ll admit during voir dire that victimless drug crims shouldn’t be prosecuted. If everyone did this, he said, and the system couldn’t empanel a jury for possession cases, then the system would have to adapt.

That’s his proposal to end the war on drugs: not to play the game.

He says his fellow writer-producers on “The Wire” have already signed on, and tonight he was spreading the word to the 300 or so of us.

Now I’ve posted it here.

Thoughts?

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