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Nixon's early emphasis on drug treatment was superceded by his desire to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.