Media Talk: 'Nightline' to Devote a Full Week to Drugs

Ted Koppel is the first to say that "Nightline" this week will be
journalism imitating art: five nights about drug trafficking inspired
by the Steven Soderbergh film "Traffic." That will be 150 minutes of
"Nightline," three minutes more than the entire film. But that
includes the commercials.

"It's not the movie that got me to do five nights, it's the subject,"
Mr. Koppel said last week. Mr. Koppel sounded as if he had questions
about the consequences of laws mandating tough sentences for drug
offenders. "We've got more than two million people in prison in this
country, more on a per capita basis than in any other country in the
world, and the majority are in for drug-related crimes," he said.

Moviegoers who watch "Nightline" on ABC may have a sense of the past
revisited as Mr. Koppel covers much of the same ground that "Traffic"
did.

"One of the first questions I wanted to raise with people, customs
officials or D.E.A. people, is, `Have you seen the movie, and how
does it compare to reality?' " Mr. Koppel said.

"They all had the same reaction: this movie gets it right, and what
it gets right above everything else is the interconnection between
and among the growers, the traffickers and the consumers. It never
lets you believe if we could just get rid of the growers, the problem
would be over, or if we could just get rid of the traffickers, the
problem would be over. This is a demand-generated problem."