COMING UP ON NIGHTLINE

The Reality Behind The Movie Traffic

WASHINGTON, March 19 " Tonight we have the first of a five-part series on
drug-trafficking from Mexico to the United States " the reality behind the
movie Traffic.

When you work at Nightline, you don't get out much. We spend most of our
nights here at the office.

So movie recommendations are taken pretty seriously, because with only one
or two nights a week that you can go out, you want to make the best of
them. So one Monday, a lot of us came in raving about the same movie,
Traffic. Not only is it a terrific movie, nominated for Best Picture (and
no, Disney had nothing to do with it, we checked) but it presents a very
accurate and very bleak picture of the drug war.

Now, all of us have been covering drug stories for years.

But it seems to have become one of those stories that has become part of
the background noise. It's always out there, but we sort of ignore it.
Well, at least for us, the movie changed that. It really energized us, and
so we set out to produce a five-part series that will begin tonight.

If you haven't seen the movie, don't worry, you don't need to have seen it
to appreciate this week's broadcasts. But it is worth seeing.

Ted and a team of producers set out to look at the realities of the drug
war. A number of the characters in the movie are based on real people, and
in a couple of cases, the real people appear in the movie.

That's the case with tonight's broadcast.

The customs official shown briefing the drug czar (Michael Douglas' role)
really is a customs official, and Ted begins with him at the border
crossing south of San Diego. He shows us what the U.S. government is doing
to stop drugs from coming across: trained dogs, a new X-ray machine that
can X-ray a whole vehicle, and every day they cut open cars to find drugs.

But then we'll hear from a former member of one of the cartels who talks
about how they beat customs to move their loads into the United States. And
finally, we'll hear from teenagers about just how easy it is to get drugs
far from the border, and how difficult it is for local police to try to
stop it.

Then tomorrow we'll tell you about the biggest, most powerful, and most
vicious of the cartels that controls the Tijuana border crossing.

On Wednesday, you'll meet people that live in fear of the smugglers, a
reporter who crossed them and now goes nowhere without a dozen armed
bodyguards, a neighborhood in the United States under siege, and officials
in the new Mexican government who have to think about their safety as they
try to fight the cartels.

Thursday's broadcast is based on the expression "silver or lead." That's
the choice that a number of officials and law enforcement agents are given
by the cartels: Take our silver or take our lead. And Friday will focus
again on the teenagers you'll first meet tonight as they talk about their
experiences in buying, selling and using drugs, and how they fooled their
parents.

In the past, I've asked you how many broadcasts you all watch when we do
run series, and many of you said two or three.

And in the past few days, a number of you have written in to suggest that
everyone just set their VCRs. Well, this is a series that we're very proud
of, so we hope you'll watch all five nights, or set your VCRs, or your Tivo
boxes, or whatever, but we hope that you will find the next five broadcasts
compelling, challenging, and maybe even disturbing.