How can I describe The Corner? How can I do justice to this heartbreaking book? You know David Simon and Ed Burns as the creative force behind The Wire. This non-fiction book is the truth behind the television, a revealing portrait of a broken family living at one of the worst drug corners in West Baltimore. Dope and coke are sold 24/7, violence is omnipresent, and the pursuit of drug-induced happiness has made life and liberty seem as distant as the moon.

Gary McCollough is a former businessman turned dopehound, a street philosopher who's basic decency and inability to hurt anyone else means that he's a perennial victim. Fran, his ex-wife, has buried her own life in the needle. Their son, DeAndre, is fifteen, caught between boyhood posing and the awful realities of life on the corner. Other characters round out the neighborhood. Ella Thompson volunteers at the rec center, one of the last honest citizens left. Fat Curt is an old veteran of addiction, his organs failing and limbs swollen, who has no where else to go. Blue runs a shooting gallery in the shell of his dead mother's house.

In this year long story, Simon and Burns follow their subjects, painting revealing portraits of bare humanity under the twin weights of drugs and a society that has abandoned any sense of responsibility towards the ghettos. The first rule of the corner is chasing the blast, that rush of pleasure from the the drug and relief from the snake of withdrawal symptoms, and a moment of blessed escape away from the grind of life. And life, life is absolutely grinding. It's an endless series of scams and being scammed to get money for the dope. It's getting beat on by other crews, by your friends and family, by the police. It's overloaded systems of public services, education, justice, healthcare, that can barely manage to cart the bodies away, let alone help anyone.

Simon and Burns are at their best when they're talking about hopelessness, and the things that lift their subject past it. Corner life is lived entirely in present tense. Even a plan as simple as "I'll buy a loaf of bread to have toast tomorrow" is void in the face of junkie roommates. The effort required to get clean, a months long ordeal to get a rehab slot in the face of requests for documents, court dates, and the blast itself, is a fragile thread, let alone the effort of staying clean when drugs are easier to get than coffee. The most tragic parts of the book concern DeAndre, a smart kid who's almost entirely given up on school, but doesn't have the brutality and fearlessness it takes to make it as a gangster. At 15, DeAndre impregnates his 13 year old girlfriend Tyreeka. Neither of them are in any sense ready to be parents, but the baby provides a focus for a girl who's not sure that she matters to anyone, and a sense of immortality for boy who sees only a little bit of life ahead.

At times, Simon devolves into a general rant at the War on Drugs, and the false hope that 30 years of brutality can win against the corner, against the raw desire for oblivion in our midst. And now, 25 years on, the drug war is much the same. With the Opioid Epidemic, the Corner is now in white America too. As I hit 'save' on this review, President Trump plans to release a drug plan that includes death for drug dealers.

Screw it. Down the flag. Let the dealers and the junkies hold a parade down the National Mall. Throw some samplers to the crowd, because That Shit Is The Bomb. Drugs won. War over.