Pubdate: Mon, 15 Jan 2001
Source: Newsweek (US)
Copyright: 2001 Newsweek, Inc.
Contact:  251 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019
Website: http://www.msnbc.com/news/NW-front_Front.asp
Author: Jonathan Alter
Cited: TLC-DPF http://www.drugpolicy.org/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/traffic.htm (Traffic)

A WELL-TIMED 'TRAFFIC' SIGNAL

A New Movie Faces The Drug War - or Should We, Like The Real Drug Czar,
Call It A 'Cancer'?

At one point in "Traffic," the riveting new Steven
Soderbergh film, the freshly installed drug czar (played by Michael
Douglas) asks his staff to "think outside the box" about the drug
problem. There's a pause.

NOBODY SAYS ANYTHING. This is the message of the movie. Even the
film's cliches-drug informants killed, the teenage daughter of the
drug czar deeply addicted-help reinforce the basic staleness of our
national debate on drug policy. Soderbergh seems to be saying: Think
harder. I don't know what they are, but there must be some answers.

As a matter of fact, there are. The movie couldn't be more timely:
while Congress cowers, taxpayers are beginning to rethink a policy
that costs them $20 billion a year. Voters in five states approved
drug-reform ballot initiatives in November. In California, the
little-noticed but landmark Proposition 36 requires that nonviolent
offenders be treated instead of jailed. As many as 37,000 fewer
Californians will be incarcerated annually, saving hundreds of
millions of dollars. Oregon and Utah backed forfeiture reform, so that
the assets of accused drug dealers can no longer be seized prior to
conviction, a horribly unconstitutional but widespread prosecutorial
practice.

In New York, meantime, Gov. George Pataki reversed himself last week
and pledged to reform the draconian "Rockefeller drug laws," while
Mayor Rudy Giuliani last year came down in favor of offering methadone
to heroin addicts. In New Mexico, where GOP Gov. Gary Johnson is a
leading drug reformer, a state advisory group chaired by a retired
judge last week recommended decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana.

A Onetime Noninhaler's View

And in Rolling Stone magazine last month, a onetime noninhaler named
Bill Clinton agreed about pot, adding that mandatory minimum sentences
that tie the hands of judges should be "re-examined" and the
sentencing disparities between crack and powdered cocaine (which
Clinton tried and failed to address) are "unconscionable" and
essentially racist.

The real-life drug czar left office last week after a record five
years sounding a lot like the chastened Michael Douglas character. "I
think change is coming to America," Gen. Barry McCaffrey told me in an
exit interview. Instead of talking about "drug lords" or
"interdiction," McCaffrey used words like "holistic" and "rational" to
explain his reasons for increasing prevention and treatment funding,
which were up by more than a half and a third, respectively, during
his tenure. While the budget is still overwhelmingly tilted toward law
enforcement, McCaffrey has nudged the ball in the right direction,
rejecting what he calls "the internal gulag" of more incarceration for
mere users.

That "gulag" is one of the great undercovered stories of our
time -- 400,000 Americans behind bars on drug charges. And it's not as if
the system even treats them. About 85 percent of those released from
prison have substance-abuse problems, a recipe for rearrest.
"McCaffrey's the best drug czar we've had," says Ethan Nadelman, a
drug reformer who runs the New York-based Lindesmith Center. "But he
still falls short. In every other realm of health care, we blame the
treatment provider if something goes wrong. Here we still blame the
patient."

It's Not 'War,' It's 'Cancer'

But at least McCaffrey is trying to retire the military metaphors:
"I'm an Army general with three purple hearts, and I don't think it's
a 'war.' It's more accurate to call drugs a 'cancer'." He's pushing a
middle way, backing new "drug courts" that combine treatment with "the
stick" of jail. The number of such courts is up from a dozen to 700 in
the past five years. McCaffrey is against mandatory minimums and for
methadone, though he never did come around on needle exchanges, which
have been repeatedly proved helpful in stopping the spread of AIDS.
Most allies are far ahead of the United States on such "harm
reduction" strategies.

"If [the new drug czar] asked, 'What's the one big thing you've not
done?'," McCaffrey concludes, "I'd say, 'Get access to insurance for
drug abuse and mental health.' If we did that, spousal abuse, violence
and the rest will go way down. OMB says: can we afford it? I say it's
a no-brainer that will save us immense resources."

But will the Bushies have the brains for this and other drug-policy
no-brainers? Not clear. Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, Bush's nominee
to run the Department o Health and Human Services, sees drug abuse as
a public-health problem; he's even sponsored a needle-exchange program
in Milwaukee. But if John Ashcroft becomes attorney general, he's
likely to push the policy back toward more criminalization. Ashcroft
opposed even McCaffrey's advertising campaign against drugs, which the
drug czar says has helped cut teenage drug use by 21 percent in the
past two years. At the Justice Department, Ashcroft will be able to
direct more prosecutorial resources toward drug cases, not to mention
nominate on average one judge a week for the federal bench (that's how
many vacancies arise) and have a big say in the choice of the new drug
czar.

"Traffic" has cameos by real-life senators like Orrin Hatch and
Barbara Boxer, each of whom found something to like. One of the
beauties of the film is that it somehow manages to satisfy both
drug-enforcement officials by showing them as heroes and drug-policy
critics by exposing the futility of sealing the border. The horrors of
addiction and interdiction get equal time. By staying descriptive
rather than didactic, Soderbergh re-energizes the drug-policy debate
without actually entering it. That's up to the rest of us.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake