Hamsterdam

0Ross • 6th Nov 2009 • Learning, Thinking • academic, governance, policy, policy transfer, television

You know that you have been studying too hard when one of your policy case studies comes from The Wire.

In this season, a maverick Baltimore cop, Major Colvin, in despair, stops enforcing drug laws in certain areas of the city. The local drug dealers love the policy, and refer to it as ‘Hamsterdam’ – citing a direct transfer of Amsterdam’s liberal cannabis policies. In reality, Colvin’s plan wasn’t very much like the law in Amsterdam at all. But the dealers obviously had their state-centric hats on that day – had they spent more time reading, they’d be thinking ‘maybe this is an example of the slow process of international, cross-jurisdictional policy learning’!

I think that films are a powerful way to develop case studies. The Mist is a paradigm of testing moral absolutism and Kant’s categorical imperative for a start.