LETTERS FROM READERS

"Traffic"

TO THE EDITOR:

Gary Rosen's review of Traffic surprised me, mostly because I found myself
in basic agreement with his analysis of the movie--as a movie ["Traffic and
the War on Drugs," April]. Where his review falls short, I believe, is in
his commentary on the real-world drug policies and problems that are
dramatized in Traffic. He makes three mistakes.

The first is his numerous references to a "drug-legalization movement."
Most Americans understand the phrase "drug legalization" to mean making not
just marijuana but heroin, cocaine, PCP, and all other drugs legally
available in more or less the same way as alcohol, tobacco, or even coffee.
By that definition, it is hard to discern any real movement for drug
legalization. What does exist is a growing movement for drug-policy reform,
composed of varying groups opposed to the excesses of the war on drugs.
Most agree that marijuana prohibition is a costly failure that needs to
end, but with respect to drugs like heroin and cocaine, the dominant reform
view favors "harm reduction," which might best be defined as the
intersection of public health and human rights with respect to drug use and
abuse.

I am not sure why Mr. Rosen makes this mistake. Perhaps it is because the
most prominent conservative supporters of drug-policy reform--men such as
Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Governor Gary Johnson of New
Mexico--do advocate drug legalization. But if one chooses to "follow the
money" donated to this cause by George Soros (the primary supporter of my
organization) and others, or to focus on what leading reformers say and do
day to day, then the expression "drug-legalization movement" is an
unfortunate and misleading misnomer.

Mr. Rosen's second mistake is to assume that any relaxation of
prohibitionist controls will result in more drug abuse. Here the evidence
is against him. According to a recent survey by the World Health
Organization, the incidence of marijuana use in much of Europe pales in
comparison to that of the United States, notwithstanding the fact that
Europe has increasingly followed the Dutch lead on decriminalization while
U.S. policies have become ever more repressive. The Dutch claim that they
have succeeded in making cannabis "boring." In the U.S., meanwhile, high
school students say that marijuana is easier to obtain than alcohol.

Mr. Rosen's third mistake is to point to the apparent drop in the number of
people who admit to having used marijuana or cocaine as significant
evidence that U.S. drug policies have been successful. This drop occurred
mostly during the 1980's. But in 1980 no one had ever heard of the cheap,
smokable form of cocaine called crack or of drug-related HIV infection. By
the 1990's, both had reached epidemic proportions in American cities. Is
this success?

Or consider that in 1980, the federal budget for drug control was about $ 1
billion, and state and local budgets perhaps two or three times that. Now
the federal drug-control budget has ballooned to roughly $ 20 billion,
two-thirds of it for law enforcement, and state and local governments spend
even more. On any day in 1980, approximately 50,000 people were behind bars
for violating drug laws. Now the number is approaching 500,000--more people
than all of Europe, despite its greater population, incarcerates for
everything. Is this success?

Government expenditures and policies on drug control need to be assessed
according to a real bottom line. The current strategy--with its failure to
distinguish between drug use and drug abuse, and its indifference to the
mounting costs and negative consequences of the policies themselves--needs
to be held accountable. If conservatives will not do it, someone needs to.

ETHAN NADELMANN
Executive Director
The Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation
New York City

TO THE EDITOR:

My thanks to Gary Rosen for giving a boost to the idea of drug testing and
sanctions for offenders on probation and parole--and for crediting the idea
to me, as if I were its originator rather than its promoter. We agree about
the movie Traffic: as an essay on drug policy, the film is badly confused.

But Mr. Rosen's review embraces the one error about drugs the film avoids:
that we face a stark choice between something called "the war on drugs" and
something called "drug legalization." That is a comfortable myth for both
the legalizers and the warriors, but it is manifestly false. There are
other options. It is not hard to make a list of policy reforms that,
without changing the legal status of any drug, would greatly reduce the
total damage done to drug users and others by drug abuse, drug dealing, and
drug-control efforts.

In addition to "coerced abstinence" as part of probation and parole, the
list would include: a smarter, smaller law-enforcement effort, aimed mainly
at open-air drug markets; much more selectivity in imprisonment for drug
dealing, focusing on dealers who use violence or employ juveniles; less
hysteria, and more respect for the facts, in drug-prevention messages
distributed via the mass media, the classroom, and official pronouncements;
better, and more easily available, drug treatment; more efforts to promote
"natural" or "spontaneous" desistance among people with drug-abuse
disorders, including a publicity campaign like the one that did so much to
increase the "quit rate" among smokers; and, finally, serious attention to
the alcohol problem.

Indeed, alcohol creates more havoc--more addiction, more disease, more
fetal damage, more family breakup, more accidents, and more crime--than all
the illicit drugs combined. Yet practical policies to reduce that damage
cannot even be discussed. Why, for example, do we forbid convicted drunken
drivers to drive, but allow them to continue to drink? If a bartender may
not serve a law-abiding twenty-year-old, how about a twenty-five-year-old
drunken wife-beater? The average drink imposes costs on third parties of
about a dollar; is a dime really an adequate level of taxation on it? And
when are we going to see some anti-drunkenness ads on television?

Mr. Rosen's essay badly understates the damage done by a hypertrophied
drug-enforcement campaign and overstates the magnitude of recent moves
toward moderation in drug control. It also gives hawkish policies too much
credit for hopeful trends in some drug-related statistics. To the drug-war
hawks, improved numbers always show that tough policies are working, while
bad trends--such as increases in teenage marijuana use in the early 1990's
and in heroin and methamphetamine use more recently--simply prove that we
are not being tough enough.

Retiring the "drug war" metaphor, as Gary Rosen suggests, would represent
progress. But metaphors are easier to change than policies, and policies
are easier to change than patterns of thought. As long as we think of the
problem in terms of decent, ordinary folk versus "the drug culture," we
will continue to incur, and inflict, needless suffering.

MARK A.R. KLEIMAN
UCLA School of Public Policy & Social Research
Los Angeles, California

TO THE EDITOR:

I got the same message from Traffic as Gary Rosen did: that it would be
better to legalize drugs than to prohibit them. But unlike Mr. Rosen, I do
not believe that "our decades-long campaign against illegal drug use has
been less than a triumph." I believe it has been a disaster.

By turning popular drugs into contraband, prohibition causes tremendous
inflation in their price. Drugs that cost only pennies to grow and process
sell for hundreds of dollars on the street, amounting to countless billions
of dollars each year. In a rational society, such a gigantic industry would
be regulated. But the intense competition of the drug market is regulated
only by violence. Rival dealers do not go to court with their
disputes--they shoot it out in the streets, killing hundreds of people each
year in drive-by shootings. The drug market now holds entire urban
neighborhoods hostage.

Of course, ending the prohibition of drugs would not be a panacea. But
imagine the benefits of curbing the black market. Huge profits would come
to an end, kids would not be drawn to dealing, addicts would not be pushed
to steal, and the sea of violence and crime would subside. The government
could divert billions, now wasted on interdiction, to education and treatment.

SAMUEL RABINOVE
White Plains, New York

TO THE EDITOR:

Gary Rosen's commentary on Traffic was measured, and concluded with a
positive call to drop the term "war on drugs" and all it implies from the
nation's efforts to address its very real drug problem.

What Mr. Rosen totally fails to see is the causal connection between the
war on drugs and the increasing dominance in American society of police,
prosecutors, and prisons. Police departments all over the country have come
under ever more criticism for treating anyone even associated with drugs as
a pariah effectively beyond the pale of constitutional rights. Prosecutors,
it has been shown, are more and more likely to violate ethical and legal
standards by bringing maliciously selective prosecutions, using jailhouse
snitches, and withholding exonerating evidence. And, thanks to the war on
drugs, prisons have become a growth industry in America, looking like a
Gulag if you are poor and black. Add all this up and the result is a
national disaster and a burgeoning police state.

A better way lies in the movement known as "harm reduction." Under such a
regime, a person who uses drugs yet manages to lead a responsible
life--that is, does not become a burden on the rest of society--would not
be a societal concern. Legal sanctions would apply only when a drug user
engages in bad behavior, such as assault, robbery, driving while
intoxicated, or being a public nuisance.

None of this will work, of course, unless there are serious programs
available for people to get effective drug rehabilitation. And, yes, given
the presence of bad behavior, attendance in such programs can and should be
mandatory. If offenders refuse help, then lock them up.

Less moralizing and more pragmatism would go a long way toward solving the
drug problem. Despite its limitations and Hollywood shortcomings, Traffic
is an excellent catalyst to begin a real discussion.

JOHN GRANT
Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania

TO THE EDITOR:

I understand Gary Rosen's worry about the legalizing of drugs. But it is
also important to consider the well-being of the foreign countries where
our drug habits wreak havoc. In Colombia, for example, the
multimillion-dollar drug cartels can easily finance both left-wing
guerillas and right-wing death squads to protect their plantations and
laboratories, thus destabilizing that whole nation. No amount of U.S.
military assistance will alter this situation.

We have to do away with the financial base of these criminals. The only way
to do this is to legalize, under strict government control, the import and
manufacture of narcotics, not only in the U.S. but wherever drug abuse is
rampant.

RALF THILEN
Parkland, Florida

TO THE EDITOR:

The defensive tone of Gary Rosen's review puzzled me. Traffic was far
inferior to the British television series on which it was based. The
original Traffik (as it was called) was far more clear-eyed about drugs,
their sources (in Southern Asia rather than Mexico), the human scum who
trade in them, and their corrupting effects on ordinary people in the Third
World. Moreover, it blew apart the sort of sophistry (e.g., that alcohol
and cigarettes are the same as crack cocaine) that Traffic's director,
Steven Soderbergh, piles into his somewhat pathetic pro-drugs homily.

There are good moral reasons for condemning the drug trade, aside from the
objective physical and social damage it causes. The vicious exploitation of
human weakness for money has always been outside the pale of decent
society. To say it is now okay because these criminals--and the mortal
frailty they exploit--cannot be wiped out is an argument that applies just
as neatly to murder or any other crime.

HERB GREER
Manchester, England

GARY ROSEN writes:

Ethan Nadelmann is the very capable, if exasperatingly disingenuous, point
man for a movement that dare not declare its true aims. How did I make the
"mistake" of associating him and his billionaire patron, George Soros, with
so extremist a goal as drug legalization? Well, by casting my eyes over
some of Mr. Nadelmann's statements on the subject, like "The Case for
Legalization" (The Public Interest), "How to Legalize" (an interview with
Mother Jones), "Thinking Seriously about Alternatives to Drug Prohibition"
(Daedalus), and "Should We Legalize Drugs? History Answers Yes" (American
Heritage).

Of course, all of these articles date from the late 1980's and early
1990's; by 1995, when Mr. Nadelmann gave an interview to High Times, he had
reconsidered his choice of words. As he told the marijuana-advocacy
magazine, "I don't talk about legalization per se that much anymore. That
term is so loaded."

Indeed, it is--which is why Mr. Nadelmann now speaks with such practiced
evasiveness. I have no reason to doubt that he is against legalization when
it is defined, as he insists on defining it, as making "not just marijuana
but heroin, cocaine, PCP, and all other drugs legally available in more or
less the same way as alcohol, tobacco, or even coffee." But in reality the
term means nothing more than ending or significantly reducing the legal
sanctions that apply to drugs--a goal that Mr. Nadelmann, despite his use
of soothing euphemisms like drug-policy "reform" and "harm reduction,"
still very much supports. As he told the Wall Street Journal this past May,
"the core vision" of his work for George Soros "is that people shouldn't be
punished for what they put in their bodies, absent harm to others." Does he
really believe that "most Americans" would not consider this an endorsement
of drug legalization?

Truth in labeling is important. Even more important are the likely
consequences of removing the legal prohibitions--and with them, ultimately,
the social taboos--that currently apply to drug use. Mr. Nadelmann assures
us that there is no reason to worry, since the Dutch, by decriminalizing
marijuana use, have made it "boring." Perhaps, but according to the most
authoritative study on the subject (published in Science), they have also
made it considerably more common: among eighteen-year-olds in the
Netherlands, those who admitted to using the drug rose from 15 percent in
1984 to 44 percent in 1996.

Is this--to borrow Mr. Nadelmann's refrain--success? Is this the example we
wish to emulate? Marijuana may be easier to obtain than alcohol for some
American high-school students, as he claims, but the real question is how
many of them wish to obtain it. The number would surely rise dramatically
if the use of marijuana were transformed from an illegal activity into a
mere privilege reserved for adults.

Mr. Nadelmann decries the expense of our current drug-control regime and
the number of Americans it has sent to prison. Samuel Rabinove, John Grant,
and Ralf Thilen--who are more candid than Mr. Nadelmann in their advocacy
of legalization--point to other costs: violence in our cities, malfeasance
by overzealous police and prosecutors, devastating warfare in South
America. There is an element of truth in these claims, as I acknowledged in
my article, but also the usual quotient of hyperbole and hysteria. (No, Mr.
Grant, we do not live in a "burgeoning police state"--nor, I might add, is
it the case, as Mr. Nadelmann has outrageously suggested to interviewers,
that drug-users are now "persecuted" and "demonized" much as Jews have been
in the past.)

Still, any serious effort at reform must begin by recognizing that, in most
respects, our drug-control policies have performed pretty well. The
incidence of drug-related crime and violence has dropped considerably over
the last decade, and the overall trend in drug use--despite a recent upward
spurt and the arrival on the scene of various new drugs--is encouraging.
Marijuana and cocaine consumption remain low as compared with the late
1970's and early 1980's, and the level of heroin use has been stable. As a
percentage of the population, half as many Americans now use an illicit
drug as did so fifteen or twenty years ago. With other negative social
indicators so sharply on the rise over the same period, this must be
considered progress.

The basic premise of existing policy--the premise that Ethan Nadelmann and
his allies find so objectionable--is that drug use should be illegal. Mark
A.R. Kleiman and I share this premise; none of his recommended reforms, as
he emphasizes, would involve "changing the legal stares of any drug."
Indeed, Mr. Kleiman's interesting and (for the most part) worthwhile
suggestions assume that we will continue to impose sanctions on drug users
and dealers and to bring public opinion forcefully to bear in discouraging
drug consumption. It is thus clear to me why Mr. Kleiman considers Traffic
"badly confused" as "an essay on drug policy," but less clear why he is so
indignant about my similar reaction to it, and insists on classifying me as
an unthinking drug "warrior" or "hawk."

Finally, Herb Greer wonders why I adopted a "defensive tone" in my review
of Traffic. He is mistaken. My tone was not defensive but admiring--Traffic
is a powerful, if ultimately wrong-headed, piece of film-making, and Steven
Soderbergh richly deserved his Academy Award for directing it.