Pubdate: Sun, 01 Apr 2001
Source: Commentary (US)
Website: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/i
Address: 165 East 56th Street, New York, NY 10022
Contact:  2001 American Jewish Committee
Fax: (212) 751-1174
Author: Gary Rosen

"TRAFFIC" AND THE WAR ON DRUGS

SINCE THE late 1960's, when Hollywood began turning them out with some 
regularity, movies about drugs have tended to follow one of two basic 
formulas. Some have tried to capture, with varying degrees of realism, the 
actual experience of drug use, with results ranging from psychedelic 
celebrations like the countercultural "classic," Easy Rider (1969), to 
jarring cautionary tales like Trainspotting (1996). More widely seen, and 
more commercially successful, have been the countless movies-The French 
Connection (1971), Midnight Express (1978), Scarface (1983), Beverly Hills 
Cop (1984), Lethal Weapon (1987), Clear and Present Danger (1994)-that have 
used the spectacular violence and profit of the illegal drug trade as a 
backdrop for conventional dramatic or action fare.

Traffic, the new film by the director Steven Soderbergh, borrows elements 
from both of these tried-and-true forms, but in the service of a much more 
ambitious goal. Inspired by a miniseries that aired on British television 
in 1989, Traffic weaves together three loosely intersecting story-lines 
into a portrait that, in the end, is less about any of the film's 
characters than about the drug problem as a whole, from its impact on 
families to its place in our national politics. As Soderbergh told his 
screenwriter, "I want it big. I want to do an epic."

Nor is the point of this broad cinematic canvas merely descriptive. As a 
number of critics have emphasized in their acclaim for Traffic-the New York 
Film Critics Circle crowned it the best picture of 2000, and it may well 
win the Academy Award after this article goes to press-the movie's merits 
are not just of the artistic variety.

Traffic, they insist, carries a sorely needed message.

For Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, it effectively dramatizes "the basic 
staleness of our national debate on drug policy." In the New York Times, 
Stephen Holden praised its "coolly scathing overview of the 
multibillion-dollar drug trade and the largely futile war being waged 
against it," a view echoed, if more bluntly, by a writer for the on-line 
magazine Salon, who found the movie a refreshing declaration that the war 
on drugs is "all bullshit."

No less pleased by Traffic have been the advocates of legalizing-or, as 
they prefer, "decriminalizing"-drugs. The Lindesmith Center, whose primary 
backer, the billionaire George Soros, has funded ballot initiatives across 
the country aimed at repealing various drug laws, has even devoted a 
state-of-the-art website to the film, complete with a video game and prizes.

As Ethan Nadelmann, the group's executive director, explained, "The movie 
got people stirred up and got them thinking-we hope to inspire them to get 
involved."

EACH OF Traffic's three narratives takes place in a different locale. The 
first, in Mexico, centers on a principled Tijuana policeman named Javier 
Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro), whose success in combating local traffickers 
wins him a place by the side of the country's leading drug-fighter, General 
Salazar (Tomas Milian), the head of the federal police. When Salazar turns 
out to be the corrupt tool of a leading cocaine ring, the disillusioned 
Rodriguez becomes an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), 
but not before his partner, intent on enriching himself by doing the same, 
is discovered by Salazar's men and brutally murdered.

Meanwhile, across the border in suburban San Diego, Helena Ayala (Catherine 
Zeta-Jones), a wealthy, pregnant housewife, returns from her posh country 
club one day to find that her husband, a legitimate businessman as far as 
she knows, has been arrested by the DEA-and that he is, in fact, the 
region's chief cocaine distributor. Once over the shock, she quickly takes 
control of her husband's criminal empire, going so far, finally, as to 
arrange the assassination of the chief witness against him.

As these events unfold on the front lines of the illegal drug trade, a 
rigidly conservative Ohio judge named Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) 
prepares to take his first trip to Washington as the President's newly 
appointed drug "czar." Unknown to him, however, his baby-faced, 
high-achieving prep-school daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen), has 
begun to use drugs, graduating quickly from marijuana to crack cocaine.

Shaken by Caroline's descent into addiction, and by his own helplessness to 
prevent it, Wakefield eventually resigns his new office and returns home to 
help her undergo treatment.

Though the three parts of Traffic occasionally overlap, it is never for 
more than a moment, just long enough, for instance, for General Salazar to 
declare his eagerness to cooperate to the credulous Judge Wakefield, or for 
the policeman Javier and the drug baroness Helena to cross paths at the 
U.S.-Mexico border.

Indeed, a notable achievement of the film is that, despite its length 
(almost two-and-a-half-hours) and fast-paced cuts between largely 
unconnected plots, it moves along with great energy and coherence.

The key to this accomplished story-telling is the distinctive look that 
Soderbergh (who doubled as the cinematographer) has imparted to each of the 
three narratives: the sequences in Mexico are in sepia tones, brightly lit 
and grainy, with the feel of an amateur documentary; San Diego appears in 
an almost surreal brightness and clarity; and the environs of Judge 
Wakefield, in both Ohio and Washington, are invariably bathed in cool blues 
and darkness.

Strong, too, is the overall quality of the enormous cast of Traffic, which 
features more than 100 speaking parts.

Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the film's marquee stars, give 
competent if unremarkable performances, but they are upstaged by two lesser 
known actors, Benicio Del Toro as the stoical, slow-speaking Mexican cop 
and Erika Christensen, who brings the perfect combination of insecurity and 
sulky arrogance to the role of a spoiled, drug-addled teenager.

Given the nature of big Hollywood productions, Traffic's failings as a 
movie are predictable enough.

Characters undergo wildly implausible transformations-from suburban matron 
to vicious drug lord, from blazer-wearing schoolgirl to trick-turning crack 
whore-in the blink of an eye. And the plot itself depends too often on 
drug-movie cliches: a distraught father searching the ghetto for his 
troubled daughter, cops waging a losing battle to protect a key government 
witness, third-world officials secretly serving the interests of an 
all-powerful drug syndicate.

All the same, Traffic is, as such things go, an engaging and original film, 
the sort of entertainment one wishes the movie industry produced more often.

THIS IS so despite the fact that Traffic is also a sophisticated bit of 
propaganda on behalf of the drug-legalization movement, or at least is 
decidedly in its corner.

For obvious reasons, those associated with the movie have tried to 
emphasize what they see as its evenhandedness ("If we've done our jobs 
right," Soderbergh has said, "everybody will be pissed off.") And there are 
in fact a few sops in Traffic to those who take a harder line: two 
courageous DEA agents, the foot soldiers in the war on drugs, are perhaps 
the most endearing and attractive characters in the film; Judge Wakefield, 
at a Georgetown cocktail party, hears the advice of such conservative 
stalwarts (in cameo appearances) as Senators Orrin Hatch and Don Nickles; 
and the ordeal of young Caroline Wakefield, far from glamorizing drug use, 
shows its often hideous consequences.

But none of this interferes with Traffic's clear intent to argue that U.S. 
antidrug policy is an abject failure, focused wrongheadedly on supply 
rather than demand and depending exclusively on the crude tools of law 
enforcement. Sometimes this message finds expression in awkward 
speechifying: at one point, for instance, an arrested drug operative 
informs DEA agents, "Your whole life is pointless.

You realize the futility of what you're doing and you do it anyway." The 
same message is delivered, with much the same thud, by Caroline Wakefield's 
cocky, drug-supplying boyfriend, who, dragged to an inner-city crack house 
by her angry father, lectures him, "It's an unbeatable market force, man."

More often, however, and to its makers' credit, Traffic pursues its 
ideological ends by more dramatic means.

Particularly effective is the striking difference in look and style between 
the scenes in Mexico and those centering on Judge Wakefield. The drug war 
south of the border is presented almost hyperrealistically, its corruption 
and violence given verisimilitude by the choppy, unpolished, overexposed 
way in which it is filmed.

In the policy circles of the U.S., by contrast, all is dark and cold and 
steady, matching the illusion of control that prevails there.

Indeed, it is the story of Judge Wakefield's enlightenment-his gradual 
"waking," as his name announces-that gives Traffic its didactic force. At 
every turn, he confronts the impossibility of his assignment. His 
predecessor as drug czar confides that his own efforts have probably not 
"made the slightest difference." In El Paso, at a high-tech 
anti-trafficking intelligence center, he is told that the government cannot 
begin to fight the cartels, with their "unlimited budget." When he asks his 
top aides to "think outside the box" about the drug problem-the "dam is 
open for new ideas," he volunteers-they fall completely silent.

But it is the harrowing experience of trying to rescue his own daughter 
that finally shakes Judge Wakefield from his complacency. At his first 
White House press conference, he starts to describe his own "ten-point 
plan" to "win the war on drugs," only to break off in mid-speech. "I can't 
do this," he tells the reporters. "If there is a war on drugs, then many of 
our family members are the enemy, and I don't know how you can wage a war 
against your own family." And with that, he hurries from the stage and out 
the door.

In his final scene, Wakefield-whose first appearance in the movie found him 
perched high on his bench, sternly admonishing a drug defendant's 
lawyer-sits humbly alongside his wife at his daughter's support group. 
"We're here," he says, "to listen." Nor is there any ambiguity about the 
lesson he must learn.

As one of Caroline's fellow addicts declares, drug abuse is "a disease, an 
allergy of the mind"-or, as Stephen Gaghan, the film's screenwriter (and 
himself a recovering addict), told the New York Times, "drugs should be 
considered a health-care issue rather than a criminal issue."

That there is a point to some of what Traffic is saying need not be denied. 
Most informed observers would concede that our decades-long campaign 
against illegal drug use has been less than a triumph.

Nor is it especially controversial to suggest that certain methods have 
proved ineffective, or overly harsh, while others have not been employed 
nearly enough.

Last year, in response to charges of abuse, Congress made it more difficult 
for federal law-enforcement officials to seize, before trial, assets 
suspected of being tainted by drug money.

More recently, commentators and public officials from across the political 
spectrum have raised doubts about the federal government's $1.3-billion aid 
package for Colombia's antidrug fight, as well as about the "mandatory 
minimum" sentences under which so many petty drug offenders are now serving 
time.

As for efforts at prevention and treatment, which Traffic suggests have 
been scanted, the most recent real-world drug czar, Barry R. McCaffrey, 
left office having overseen substantial increases in federal spending in 
both areas, and candidate George W. Bush pledged to spend a billion dollars 
in new funds for programs aimed at helping addicts come clean.

The last five years have also witnessed a proliferation of specialized drug 
courts, which divert some nonviolent drug offenders to closely monitored 
programs of testing and treatment rather than just packing them off to prison.

Welcome as these reformist gestures may be, however, they should not 
obscure the substantial long-term progress that has been made against the 
use of illegal drugs-progress attributable in some measure to generational 
change but in no small part to the supposedly "failed" policies that are 
the target of Traffic. Not only has drug-related crime, like every other 
sort of crime, dropped substantially in recent years, but the National 
Household Survey on Drug Abuse shows an unmistakably positive overall trend.

Half as many Americans now smoke marijuana as did in 1979, and a third as 
many use cocaine.

During the same period, the number of users of any illicit drug fell from 
well over 25 million to under 15 million.

Such figures, needless to say, still point to a significant problem, a 
problem made more worrisome by recent slight increases of reported drug use 
among both teenagers and adults.

But there is no reason to think that matters would improve-and a number of 
reasons to think they would grow considerably worse-by reversing course 
entirely and adopting the approach implicitly endorsed by Traffic and more 
forthrightly proclaimed by its friends in the drug-legalization movement.

If legal sanctions against drug use were greatly relaxed or abolished 
altogether, one of the first casualties would undoubtedly be effective 
programs of treatment.

As former drug czar William J. Bennett observed recently in the Washington 
Post (responding, it should be noted, to an attack against him in an 
interview given by Traffic's Stephen Gaghan):

One clear fact . . . is that success in treatment is a function of time in 
treatment.

And time in treatment is often a function of coercion-being forced into 
treatment by a loved one, an employer, or, as is often the case, the legal 
system. . . . If we treat drug use as a purely medical problem, and 
treatment as something that can be only voluntarily taken up, fewer people 
will enter treatment-and those who enter treatment are less likely to get well.

Among the policies that could not survive such a change would be the 
promising, and widely discussed, proposal of drug-policy expert Mark 
Kleiman of UCLA to use regular drug-testing to impose "coerced abstinence" 
on parolees and probationers, who comprise the most intractable and 
dangerous population of drug users.

Moreover, by reducing both the cost and stigma of drug use, legalization in 
any meaningful form would inevitably result in a far greater number of 
users-and addicts.

Proponents of ending drug "prohibition" often speak of the advantages of 
moving toward a system more akin to the one we have long had for beer, 
wine, and liquor: as Caroline Wakefield duly, if implausibly, claims at one 
point in Traffic, "for someone my age, it's a lot easier to get drugs than 
to get alcohol." But the fact remains that while over 80 percent of 
American high-school seniors have used alcohol, only some 10 percent have 
tried LSD or cocaine.

When it comes to discouraging experimentation with hazardous substances, 
there is a world of difference between an age limit and an outright ban.*

Traffic may give a temporary boost to those who wish, despite these risks, 
to do away with an antidrug regime that has served the country reasonably 
well and, with modifications, might serve it still better in the future.

In the movie's favor, one might hope that it finally prompts politicians 
and policy-makers to retire the overused, and inappropriate, metaphor of a 
"war on drugs." Wars tend to be discrete events, decided in a few mighty 
confrontations. With illegal drugs, the important struggles are abiding 
ones, requiring not dramatic action but steadiness and resolve.

* For an illuminating and wide-ranging discussion of the likely effects of 
removing the criminal sanctions on drugs, see James Q. Wilson's "Against 
the Legalization of Drugs," Commentary, February 1990.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth