First Person: The Enemy is Every One of Us

The Acclaimed Screenwriter Of 'Traffic,' An Unflinching Inquiry Into
The War On Drugs, Learned His Material Firsthand

Feb. 12 issue - I started drinking young and hard in Louisville, Ky.,
a town known for its bourbon, cigarettes and horse racing. I grew up
on the same block where Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. I
also wanted to be a writer, like my grandfather, who carried a card
in his wallet that read, "If you find me, call my son [my father] at
this number... "

I WASN'T MUCH DIFFERENT from my peers, except where they could stop
drinking after three or six or 10 drinks, I couldn't stop and
wouldn't stop until I had progressed through marijuana, cocaine,
heroin and, finally, crack and freebase-which seem for so many people
to be the last stop on the elevator.

None of this is particularly interesting. I was white and
middle-class and took a stubborn pleasure in throwing away
opportunities. I seemed to have a skill for attracting, then
antagonizing, figures of authority and was expelled from high school
after exhausting the supply of teachers willing to have me in their
classes. I didn't care where I went as long as it was somewhere else.
Like I said, common as weeds. I didn't care where I went as long as
it was somewhere else.

I made my way to New York, where I could purchase drugs off the
street 24 hours a day. I rarely slept and felt lousy most days,
working intermittently, befriending bartenders. Eventually I got
arrested on the corner of 15th Street and 8th Avenue in a sting
designed to take down a 14-year-old drug seller and his family. The
cops wanted a white guy for the bust and waited until they got me.
Later that night I was handcuffed inside a wire cage at the precinct.
The following afternoon they chained 18 of us together and herded us
out into the sunlight and into a small box on the back of a pickup
truck. It was an Indian summer day with the temperature in the low
90s. The truck soon pulled over and parked. The fans were turned off,
the lights turned on. We started to bake.

An hour went by and people were going crazy. I had written a
"Simpsons" script and now recited it by heart. My audience was
calling me "Professor" because of my glasses and asking questions
about Bart and Lisa. Finally, the hatch separating the prisoners and
the police officers slid open. A face appeared in the little slot. A
voice said, "We're gonna ask you a question and if you get it right,
we'll turn on the fans, turn off the lights and even give you a slice
of pizza." The hatch shut.

Voices started in, "Yo, Professor, answer the question." The hatch
opened. The face looked us over-soaked, puke everywhere, steaming-and
asked, "Which is closer to you now, the moon or Europe?" I panicked.
Was this a trick question? Was every answer wrong? I looked at the
faces staring at me. Were we more likely to get to the moon than
Europe? At least we could see the moon.

I felt a level of despair that is almost indescribable. Maybe we were
already dead. Maybe this was my purgatory and this was my question.
The hatch opened. The face appeared. I said slowly, "Europe... Europe
is closer to us now." From the front seat, I heard a genuinely
perplexed voice, "F-kin' n-ers got it right." The hatch shut. I
thought about this a lot as I continued spiraling down the toilet,
trying to get clean, failing, trying again, failing again. Moon or
Europe? I moved to Los Angeles. I wrote law shows and cop shows on
television. I wrote occasionally. I spent most of my time downtown
scoring. I won an Emmy for an episode of "NYPD Blue" composed while
on heroin. I got married, got divorced and drove very, very carefully.

Finally I reached out a hand for help, and help was there. In 1997, a
few months sober, I found myself in the office of a highly placed
Department of Defense official. I was researching "Traffic" and had a
headful of statistics and a lot of questions for the man overseeing
the Pentagon's efforts in our "war on drugs." He is a smart, caring
person, and we were getting along pretty well, so I asked this
question: "What do you think about the fact that 70 percent of the
cocaine in the U.S. comes over the border from Mexico, mostly driven
in large trucks?" He looked at me for a long time, then snapped,
"What do you want me to do? You want me to do nothing and it goes to
80 percent, or you want me to dedicate eight years of my goddam life
and maybe get it down to 60? I've got a wife and kids in the Virginia
suburbs. It's not like I work for the goddam Department of
Agriculture and can quit and go lobby for the goddam soybean
industry, now is it? Is it?"

Something started to tingle in the back of my brain. There it was:
despair on the level I'd felt that New York summer. He'd gotten
himself down in a hole like the one addicts find themselves in. I
went back through my notes and realized most of the people I was
talking to, the hundreds and hundreds of people I interviewed, had
spoken in the same voice about this little "war" of ours. And that
voice was despair. When you wage a war on human nature, the enemy is
every one of us. And a question leapt to mind: after all this money
and time and suffering, which are we closer to? The moon or Europe?

Screenwriter Gaghan won a Golden Globe for "Traffic."