'TRAFFIC' HITS A NERVE

The Gritty Movie Depicting The War On Drugs Is Helping Shift The
Battlefield Toward Treatment And Education

There's a scene midway through the movie "Traffic" when the newly
appointed drug czar (played by Michael Douglas) assembles his staff
during a plane ride home from Mexico and asks them to "think outside
the box" for solutions to the drug problem.

His aides look blankly at one another.

Douglas then asks if anyone from "treatment" is aboard the
plane.

No one says a word.

The awkward silence is the message of "Traffic," the Stephen
Soderbergh movie among the nominees for best picture at tonight's
Academy Awards.

The scene captures the way many Americans now feel about the hugely
expensive, seemingly endless war on drugs -- tired, frustrated,
confused and searching anxiously for fresh ideas.

"Traffic" doesn't pretend it has the answers. It's a movie, not a new
drug policy. But the film arrived just as many Americans began seeing
the real picture of their war on drugs: The billions of dollars being
spent to lock up millions of drug users, with little or no effect on
the purity, low price and easy availability of most drugs. The utter
failure of interdiction efforts in Colombia and Mexico. The recent
record heroin deaths in the Pacific Northwest, and the devastating
spread of methamphetamine in rural areas.

"Traffic" drives home the point, but Americans already were coming to
the conclusion that "treatment" must be brought aboard and fully
deployed in the drug war.

The nation's last real-life drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, recently
told Newsweek, "I think real change is coming to America." McCaffrey
calls for more of the emerging "drug courts" that require offenders to
choose treatment or jail, and decries the "internal gulag," the
incarceration of some 400,000 people on drug charges, many of them
users, not dealers.

The Army general also said what the nation needs to make progress in
the drug war is not more helicopters, drug-sniffing dogs or mandatory
minimum prison sentences. It needs, he said, "access to insurance for
drug abuse and mental health."

The drug-policy shift is moving more quickly in the states than in the
federal government, which is still spending most of its $19
billion-a-year drug budget on interdiction. Washington state is
changing its drug laws to put more emphasis on treatment and less on
jail time. Californians passed Proposition 36, which will put most
nonviolent drug-possession offenders in treatment rather than prison.
Oregon voters reined in drug forfeiture, the practice of seizing
assets of accused drug dealers even prior to their trials.

The states have strong impetus to change their tactics. A new three-year
study, titled "Shoveling Up: The Impact of Substance Abuse on State Budgets,"
estimates that the states spent $81.3 billion dealing with substance abuse
in 1998, about 13 percent of their budgets.

The study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at
Columbia University estimated that Oregon spent $832 million on
substance abuse in 1998. Nearly all of that money went to prisons,
police, health care and other programs "shoveling up the wreckage" of
drug abuse, the study said. Only $8.61 of every $100 spent on
substance abuse in Oregon went toward prevention and treatment, it
said.

An estimated 5 million Americans are addicted to illegal drugs, but
only about 2.1 million are currently in treatment. President Bush, who
has acknowledged his own past problems with alcohol, recognizes the
importance of closing this gap. He has pledged to provide another $1
billion for drug treatment.

Bush also is searching for a new director of national drug control
policy. He must select someone who understands that addiction is a
public-health problem, and demands more than the tired effort to
attack the drug supply. When the next real-life drug czar gathers his
staff together and asks for creative ideas, someone from "treatment"
must be there to respond.