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.