A REALITY CHECK FOR FILM'S TAKE ON ADDICTION

The distraught father has learned of the extent of his teenage daughter's
addiction. He persuades her 17-year-old boyfriend to take him to a room in
a tenement building. He forces open a door and orders the middle-aged man
beside the bed to leave. She smiles hazily up at him. He kneels down beside
her and weeps.

From the darkness of a South Yarra cinema, Nicole, 25, looks up at the
screen and sees some parallels between her situation and a recovering,
teenage heroin addict in the new American movie, Traffic.

But she has misgivings about the portrayal of the character Caroline
Wakefield, daughter of a prominent anti-drug official (Michael Douglas) who
ultimately rescues her.

"There are no superheroes. No one's going to fly out of the sky and save
you," Nicole says.

The road back from addiction is long and difficult, taken mostly alone.
"You remain extremely grateful for having food on the table and for having
clean sheets," says Danielle, one of three friends, all former heroin
users, who accompanied The Sunday Ageto a screening last week. "We don't
take anything for granted because we know what it's like to not have any of
that."

Sometimes there is help from a parent or friend. Often there is
indifference. "It took me quite a while to get clean," says Nicole, who has
not used heroin in more than a year. "I guess it was the last time I went
back to my parents' house to detox after years of non-stop abuse."

Her mother had contacted a counsellor. She had seen others but this one
"told me about self-help groups and 12-step fellowships ... I'd heard in
American movies about AA. But it didn't seem like it was something real."

Caroline and her boyfriend Seth are freebasing cocaine with two friends.
With drug-skewed insight, they babble on about the way of the world. Then
they notice one boy slumped back. He's overdosed. What can they do?

In a way, the screen images mirrored some of the ordeal of the three young
women in the cinema's third row. It reflected something "really horrific
... painful and devastating". But in other ways, it had seemed a pale,
diluted version.

Eighteen-year-old actor Erika Christensen was almost convincing. But not
quite, Nicole says.

Based on the British mini-series, Traffik, the film tells inter-connected
stories set in the US and Mexico.

Douglas plays Supreme Court Justice Robert Wakefield, appointed to head
government action against trafficking. He and his wife Barbara (Amy Irving)
find the problem has reached into their own home. While Douglas reaches for
another scotch to "take the edge off" a hard day, Caroline - brilliant
student, a National Merit Finalist - descends into prostitution.

Robert Wakefield kneels beside his daughter. She looks up and smiles. He
kneels and cries. Seth knows it is he who has introduced her to the drugs.
He slips away.

The three women met through Narcotics Anonymous. They share a house in
Melbourne. We spoke over coffee after the preview.

"I guess I was in that much pain ... I was dying out there, you know what I
mean?" says the youngest, 19-year-old Rachael, who quit heroin about 13
months ago. She wonders if Christensen's Caroline conveyed the kind of
agony she associates with the experience.

"You know how you tell who're users and who're not?" says Danielle, 26, who
last used heroin 21 months ago. "Who laughs at what point. You'll notice
that the three of us did not laugh when the others were laughing."

Caroline and friends are confronted by police trying to drive away after
leaving an overdosed friend at a hospital entrance. Caroline sits,
indignant, across the desk from an officer. She is a top student at a
prestigious school.

Like Traffic's Caroline, two of the three friends, Nicole and Danielle,
went to private schools where drug abuse was prevalent.

Traffic director Steven Soderbergh was nominated by the Directors Guild of
America as best director of 2000.

Writer Stephen Gaghan, who won the Golden Globe award for best screenplay,
is all too familiar with the dark side of the drug world. He was once addicted.

Christensen's Caroline is central in reminding us of the horror of
addiction to which anyone can succumb. "She didn't look f---ed," says
Danielle. "Not really desperate enough to get to a meeting and to change
her life. She looked pretty. You don't look pretty when you're using drugs."

Caroline is at an AA session. It is her turn to talk. She speaks, briefly,
of her deep anger.

The three young women know that feeling. "It's a sense of anger; a sense of
fear," Nicole says. "I was angry. Before I started using and during. Just
that feeling that you don't know what's going on. A sense of not being able
to control stuff and it's like your head is spinning. That I related to."

Nicole works in a video store. Rachael cleans houses. Danielle says she is
"doing things that were dreams when I was using".

They rent a house in the south-eastern suburbs. "We are on the same
journey," Danielle says. "We help each other out. We relate to each other
in a way we can't relate to people in the outside environment."

Like Caroline, each woman says she was reduced to a form of prostitution.
"You can talk about having a boyfriend who you don't really care about but
he's paying for your addiction," says Danielle. "That's prostitution."

They could empathise with the parents, desperate to save their daughter.
"Knowing what I know now," Nicole says, "I think it's probably the worst
thing that could ever happen to them. They were always stressed ... It
devastated them totally."

Caroline's father breaks down while reading a formal statement to the
media. Then he stops and walks quickly past astonished colleagues. He must
go home. His family needs him.

Danielle speaks of a regained affection within her own family. "Since I've
gotten clean, I've got much more appreciation for normal people and what
they go through, especially my family."

Will cinema-goers leave with any greater insight into the plight of
addicts? "I don't think that girl showed any kind of self-hatred. She
showed hatred towards society. But it all comes from within," says Danielle.

As we entered the cinema, the three had gestured towards a poster promoting
the film: "No one here gets out clean," it said.

They remarked on the slender chances of survival. "Hey," Danielle says,
"we're f---ing miracles."

Traffic screens at Village cinemas from March 8.