AMBITIOUS LOOK AT 'DRUG WARS' Deep into the second half of "Frontline"'s two-part documentary on the war against drugs, a street dealer named Paul captures its unmistakable message with one word: "politics." After a three-decade battle against the drug trade waged by presidents from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, drug busts have swelled the US prison population to nearly 2 million, such nations as Colombia and Mexico have been corrupted to their core, and the flourishing narco business is now estimated to be a $400 billion enterprise. In its sweepingly ambitious four-hour examination of the subject, "Frontline"'s "Drug Wars" (tonight and tomorrow from 9 to 11 p.m. on WGBH-TV, Channel 2) succeeds by making a painstaking case that the government's tactics of attacking supply rather than focusing on treatment and education have bogged the nation down in a quagmire that makes Vietnam look like a surgical strike. Even the old warriors agree. At the end of the series, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Bob Stutman looks into the camera and says that beating drugs by enforcement is "an unobtainable objective." One organizing principle for watching the four hours of "Drug Wars" is to heed Paul's mantra of "politics." Viewed as the kind of epic narrative that "Frontline" tries to present, the drug war's ill-fated course seems to have been charted by a series of pivotal moments driven by political considerations. Nixon's early emphasis on drug treatment was superceded by his desire to run a law-and-order reelection campaign in 1972. Jimmy Carter endorsed the decriminalization of marijuana, but a vocal "Parents Movement," united by fears of teenagers using pot, helped reorient his administration toward a get-tough policy. In Ronald Reagan's tenure, the war on drugs was undercut seriously by the war against communism. The 1986 overdose death of college basketball star (and Celtics draft pick) Len Bias triggered a political frenzy that led to everything from the arming of forest rangers to the toughest criminal sentences in history. (Not long after, a blustery Bill Bennett became the nation's drug czar and tried to make the issue a moral crusade.) And Clinton's desire for a deal on the North American Free Trade Agreement interfered with meaningful efforts to attack Mexico's drug industry. Trying to compress 30 years of collective public policy failure into four hours of television seems an invitation for some journalistic license in "Drug Wars." In particular, the dramatic juxtaposition of the 1976 teen pot-smoking party that spawned the Parents Movement and the collapse of Carter's sensible "public health" approach to the problem feels a little too pat. The other unavoidable problem in trying to piece together an oral history from the drug kingpins, the pols, and the cops is that viewers can't be quite sure which of these parties might be taking greater liberties with the truth. But all that pales in light of the impressive breadth of "Drug Wars," which manages to interview what seems like every crucial player in the business, including Jorge and Juan David Ochoa, leaders of the infamous Medellin cocaine cartel. In one understated but remarkable scene, an interviewer attempts to get a reluctant Juan David Ochoa to estimate how much money he's made in the business. Later, a smuggler named Steve provides a riveting, detailed explanation of exactly how you move three tons of cocaine from Colombia to California. "Drug Wars" is at its best simply hammering home the folly of US policy, whether it be through footage of American servicemen in Vietnam using their weapons as marijuana pipes or by quoting cocaine runner Carlos Toro's mocking assessment that the "DEA was just like the sun. ... We have to live with it, but we are not that afraid of it." At the conclusion of "Drug Wars," when Clinton drug czar retired Army General Barry McCaffrey trumpets progress and unleashes yet another US effort to attack cocaine production in Colombia, one cannot help but recall the famous warning to those who ignore the lessons of history.
No member comments available...
|