AGREEING WITH NIXON ON HOW TO COMBAT DRUGS First there was heroin, hooking so many of the black urban poor and breeding a contagion of crime. There was marijuana, enveloping vast numbers of the white middle class. Cocaine soon flourished, a symbol of a glittery, glassy-eyed, hedonistic time. Then came crack cocaine, a drug scourge more socially corrosive than any seen before. But this is hardly news. If pressed, most informed Americans could probably recount the various waves of illegal narcotics that have flooded the United States in the recent past, none of them ever fully receding. Everyone also knows that the United States government has long tried to stop the tide. The phrase "the war on drugs" by now sounds almost tired, even dated, like a slogan from a past presidential campaign. People seem to have other things on their minds. The only drugs getting significant attention this election year are those prescribed by a doctor. Yet the producers of "Frontline," in collaboration with National Public Radio, have chosen to revisit this familiar ground in "Drug Wars," a two-part, four-hour documentary on PBS that begins tonight and concludes tomorrow. Are they out of step? Maybe so. And maybe that's the point, for this is an absorbing, illuminating, often provocative presentation - part of a series called "The PBS Democracy Project" - that would clearly like the nation to rethink its fight against illegal drugs and addiction. The lead producer, Martin Smith, and the series reporter, Lowell Bergman - the former "60 Minutes" producer whose battle with the tobacco industry was dramatized in the Michael Mann film "The Insider" - have taken on an old subject with a sense of renewed urgency. And through a well-paced mix of archival images and fresh interviews (some with former major smugglers speaking publicly for the first time) the filmmakers question the federal government's conduct and policies in what is portrayed here as a kind of fruitless American Thirty Years' War. This is journalism with a point of view, if not an agenda. But rather than stating its case and then defending it, the film lets a brisk chronology and a parade of testimony lead the viewer to an inescapable conclusion: that the drug war is failing, at a cost of billions of dollars and an untold number of lives, and that it will never be won as long as the government continues to focus on stopping the supply rather than the demand. That has been the liberal view for years. Yet if there is a hero to emerge from the White House in this film, it is Richard M. Nixon. In mounting the first full-scale antidrug offensive in the late 60's, the film says, Nixon did something unexpected for a law-and-order president: he made drug treatment, not interdiction, the centerpiece. But that emphasis, on attacking consumer demand in clinics and through education, was all but abandoned in the Reagan years and under President George Bush's drug czar, William J. Bennett, the film maintains. It portrays a rising right-wing effort to push federal policy futilely toward increasing reliance on strong-arm tactics: seizing shipments, smashing Latin American drug factories, sweeping the streets of dealers and filling jails with a disproportionate number of blacks. All of this makes for better television than pictures of people in rehab, of course, and the film has no shortage of arresting images: heavily armed drug-enforcement agents at war with the Colombian cartels, soldiers torching a cocaine lab in the jungle, a SWAT-team police raid in Harlem. One disturbing segment shows faint satellite images of Mexican police officers being gunned down in an open field by Mexican soldiers protecting drug smugglers. Government corruption, enormous riches, assassinations, freewheeling life styles: all are part of the story, and the program never succeeds so much as when it weaves these elements together to depict an international drug world that is at once repellent and fascinating. One jailed ex-smuggler remembers how millions could be made overnight in Hollywood from a single shipment of cocaine, and how an island in the Bahamas, taken over by drug lords, became a "Sodom and Gomorrah." "Drugs, sex, there's no police, you owned it, you made the rules, and it was fun," he says. The documentary portrays the government as having been slow to catch on to the latest drug trends and being outgunned and outmaneuvered by the ruthless masterminds who have created what the filmmakers describe as a $400 billion industry. And it paints a harrowing picture of the social costs. Widespread crack use among poor black women, the film reports, undermined the predominantly matriarchal society of the black urban poor. "The head of the family was now a junkie," as one commentator puts it. The film does give another side its say. Officials like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York defend the supply-side crackdowns as having been greatly effective in reducing drug-related crime. But it's a point that will not have the last word. That goes instead to Jack Lawn, a director of the Drug Enforcement Administration under President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Lawn's sympathies are now in line with those of the filmmakers when he calls for a renewed emphasis on drug-use prevention and education over buy-and-busts and helicopter assaults. "Jack Lawn," the narrator says, "thinks it's time for a radical change." FRONTLINE: Drug Wars PBS, tonight and tomorrow night (Channel 13, New York, at 9) Martin Smith, producer; Lowell Bergman, reporter; Doug Hamilton, Ken Levis, Brooke Runnette and Oriana Zill, co-producers. For "Frontline": Sharon Tiller, senior producer; Michael Sullivan, executive producer; David Fanning, senior executive producer. Presented by WGBH/Boston.
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