EVEN ARTISTIC SIGNS POINT TO UNWINNABLE DRUG WAR

In the movie "Traffic", Mexico is depicted in broad sepia tones as that dark
place where corruption flows unimpeded and where an honest cop is about as
rare as moderation in a crack house.

Ordinarily, I have no problem with that. I don't here.

You see, Steven Soderbergh's cinematic treatise on the futility of the drug
war takes an equally brutal view of the demand side of the equation. We see
how a nuclear family living in cozy affluence can be deconstructed in the
time it takes to freebase heroin. We see that the monkey on our back is not
drugs but the addictive need to get tough on an issue that demands far more
finesse than a wiretap, a SWAT team and a border blockade.

These depictions are caricatures in search of the greater good: bringing
home to the public the utter waste of our national drug policy.

Soon on President Bush's agenda will be the appointment of a drug czar.
Before he does that, however, he, his Cabinet and the drug czar-designee
should see Traffic.

After they do, one natural conclusion could be to either do away with the
office or transform it to deal solely with the demand side in a country in
which drug use has been decriminalized.

And this conclusion, of course, could be where Soderbergh wanted us to go,
though there is plenty of wiggle room for other interpretations.
Nonetheless, his film gets us there less with manipulation than with an
artistic rendition of what most of us recognize as reality: We're not making
an appreciable dent in supply or demand, are not likely to no matter how
much money and whiz-bang gadgets we give law enforcement, and that we are,
in any case, waging war against ourselves. This so-called drug war is
essentially a civil war.

No?

We jail about 450,000 people every year in the United States for non-violent
drug offenses. One in five inmates in state prison are there for drug
offenses. Two-thirds of those in federal prison are there because of drugs.

We spend $40 billion yearly on the drug war. But, you know, if this were
truly a war, we'd be up before the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague in no
time. African-Americans represent about 17 percent of cocaine users, but 88
percent of those arrested for its use, mostly for crack cocaine.

Arizona was ahead of the curve in realizing the relative ineffectiveness of
imprisoning drug users. In 1996, voters approved an initiative that said
that treatment and not imprisonment would be the emphasis for first-time
drug offenders. The Arizona Supreme Court in 1999 affirmed this, saying that
county jail time counted as imprisonment.

California voters in November passed a measure that mandated treatment
instead of imprisonment for non-violent drug offenders.

So-called drug courts are the rage in criminal courts everywhere. In these,
drug offenders go through treatment and education - with jail or prison time
hanging over their heads to stymie recidivism.

These are good first steps, though still only baby steps unless treatment
programs across the board are funded commensurately.

Imagine that $40 billion a year going toward treatment here. Imagine the
$1.6 billion we are sending to Colombia to fight coca production going
toward treatment here.

In one scene in Traffic, the drug czar played by Michael Douglas asks
officers how much money they will need to fight the war. The answer was:
More..

In this kind of war, the answer will always be "more," and it will never be
enough.