THE REEL DRUG WAR

As busy as he is these days, George W. Bush should take time out to see
Traffic, Steven Soderbergh's new movie about the war on drugs. For, in
coming days, Bush must name a new drug czar, and seeing this movie
could-and should-affect his choice. Traffic contains the usual disclaimer
about its characters bearing no resemblance to real individuals, living or
dead, but it is in fact a thinly veiled attack on the drug policy of the
Clinton Administration and its outgoing drug czar, Barry McCaffrey. (As he
prepares to leave office, Bill Clinton has suddenly become a drug reformer,
calling for the decriminalization of marijuana and the overhaul of federal
sentencing guidelines for nonviolent drug offenders. Where was he when we
needed him?) In the movie, the drug czar, like McCaffrey, is a military
man, and as in Washington, the Office of National Drug Control Policy has
been taken over by the military and law enforcement. And as in real life,
the White House is preoccupied with stopping the flow of drugs from Latin
America into the United States.

In Traffic, Soderbergh dramatizes the real-life futility of that
undertaking. Having written about the drug issue for years, I expected the
movie to take many Hollywood-driven liberties with the facts. At points,
the movie does lapse into melodrama; overall, though, it depicts US
counternarcotics efforts with dead-on accuracy. In making the film,
Soderbergh gained the cooperation of the US Customs Service and the Drug
Enforcement Administration. When a Customs official complained about
aspects of the script, Soderbergh let him rewrite part of it. The DEA felt
so comfortable with the director that it allowed him to shoot a scene
inside the El Paso Intelligence Center in Texas-the first time a film crew
was ever allowed inside the surveillance complex.

Often, access leads to co-optation, but not in Soderbergh's case. On the
contrary, the input from law enforcement, by increasing the movie's
verisimilitude, has added to the force of its indictment. One drug agent in
the movie acknowledges that the traffickers have access to
telecommunications devices far more sophisticated than anything the DEA
has. A Customs officer concedes that for every drug shipment that gets
seized, several others get through. A trafficker in a witness-protection
program chides a DEA agent about the hopelessness of his effort to bring
down a smuggling ring-even if he succeeds, others will quickly fill the gap.

Soderbergh's main vehicle for getting his message across is Robert
Wakefield, a tough-on-crime state Supreme Court judge in Cincinnati (played
by Michael Douglas). After being selected to become the next drug czar,
Wakefield prepares for the job by going out into the field. At every stop,
he is confronted by evidence of the drug war's failure. On a plane ride
back from the border, the judge-surrounded by military officers-asks for
new ideas in fighting the war. He is met by total silence.

What finally pushes Wakefield over the edge is his own 16-- year-old
daughter's descent into cocaine addiction-a subplot that's one of the
movie's main weaknesses. Within a matter of days, the teenager goes from
perky straight-A student to freebasing zombie who sells her body for drugs.
Shades of Reefer Madness. Furthermore, the movie strongly implies that it
is suburban whites like Wakefield's daughter who make up the heart of the
nation's drug problem-indeed, every drug user depicted in Traffic is white
and well-off. Of course, many privileged whites do abuse drugs, but so do
plenty of poor African-Americans and Latinos. It's as if Soderbergh can't
trust us to sympathize with drug-using minorities. This distorts the nature
of the challenge facing drug policy-makers: The movie's addicts are all so
well-heeled that they can pay for rehab out of pocket, but if treatment is
a superior way to deal with drug abuse, as Traffic suggests, then the
government will have to do much more in the way of providing it.

When Wakefield finally tracks his daughter down to a squalid flophouse in
inner-city Cincinnati, he realizes that drug abuse is a deeply rooted
social problem that cannot be fought with helicopters, guns or wiretaps. At
the press conference to announce his appointment, the judge interrupts his
prepared, cliche-ridden speech to ask, "How do you wage war on your own
family?"

More and more Americans are asking the same question. Almost every time a
drug reform measure has been put up for a vote, it has passed. In November,
voters in California-tired of paying for ever more prisons-approved a
referendum to treat, rather than incarcerate, nonviolent drug offenders. In
Manhattan, increasing numbers of prospective jurors are being dismissed
after expressing their reluctance to serve on cases involving lowlevel drug
offenders. In early January, New York Governor George Pataki announced his
intention to "dramatically reform" the notorious Rockefeller drug laws. The
crowds lining up to see Traffic offer further evidence of the changing
public mood.

How will Bush respond? On the one hand, he has repeatedly voiced sympathy
for people dependent on drugs and alcohol. He has spoken frankly about his
own drinking problem and how he managed to overcome it by religious faith.
On the other, as governor of Texas, he presided over the nation's largest
prison system, and he has seemingly never encountered a drug law he didn't
like. Moreover, by invoking only the faith-based form of treatment, he
leaves the impression that all addicts need to get well is to open their
hearts to Jesus. Most troubling of all is Bush's nominee for Attorney
General. Whenever he's had the chance, John Ashcroft has pushed for an
intensification of the drug war. He belongs to a group of hard-core
Congressional Republicans who have helped stymie all efforts at reform.

At a screening of Traffic in Washington last fall, Bill Olson, the staff
director for Republican Senator Charles Grassley's drug caucus, walked out
after Michael Douglas's bailout speech. "Shame on you!" he scolded
Soderbergh-testimony to the strong emotions the movie is stirring and the
stiff resistance its message is facing in Washington.