MOVING MOVIE MAKES ME DEEPEN LOYALTY TO COMMUNITY POLICING

For this drug warrior, the hit movie "Traffic" added aggravation to
injury in ways only a friend could know.

I was genuinely hurting. I'd recently taken a tumble in the woods,
dirt biking, and fractured a pair of vertebrae. I'd been hobbling
about on the best painkillers doctors can score, ever since.

So, while I wasn't high in any illicit sense, I was a little more
accessible than usual. Enough to admit this movie upset me more than
anything I've seen on the screen in years.

It opens with an upscale teenage girl deciding to try smoking coke. No
cinematic shock there, but she looked so much like someone I already
worry about, my stomach began to knot.

The trouble she got into was so realistic, so fast, and so
unacceptable I found myself looking at the ceiling for some scenes.
This folks, from someone who works Downtown Eastside streets, and has
seen things morbid beyond your guessing.

The drug war itself was portrayed accurately, as reviewer Roger Ebert
told us, with little irritating editorial. There was something else,
immediately apparent; some kind of director's flair for personality,
an all-too-real insight for every level.

I know the jokes police officers tell each other in surveillance vans,
and these were they. I listen endlessly to criminals talking, enough
to wonder how whoever put this together could know the chatter so well.

The hopelessness of the drug war was communicated in simple and
non-negotiable terms. The basic sentiment: only a fool would keep
trying to stop people from getting high.

It's not my central theme as a police officer, but the inner questions
were inescapable. Is this part of the job truly foolishness?

The morality puzzle is daunting, in that we all know it's not bad to
want to feel good. Most concede it's not wrong to achieve that feeling
unless you harm another, but from there, the argument
disintegrates.

We argue about whether or not we should be allowed to harm ourselves,
whether or not self-destruction harms others. We holler at each other
over recreational use, but the loudest shout is for abolition of all
drug law.

The cost and hurt of enforcement outweighs the cost and hurt of drug
use, we're informed. If enforcement brings more harm than drugs,
something better change.

What grinds my goat is that everyone involved, regardless of crusade,
is so certain they're right. If only we had the sense to listen, if
only their model would be adopted, some measure of sanity could prevail.

Yet there is no such thing as sanity. Both the drug war and the
overwhelming market for drugs make this clear. If those crying out for
free thinking were doing it themselves, they'd be designing a new
drug. One that left you super cool permanently, with no life-long
campaign of theft and deceit.

Or maybe that's small minded. Software chips and designer emotions are
more likely where this should go. You could feel any way you like, any
time or all the time, courtesy of a Duracell.

For those convinced police officers don't think these things through,
there's an insight. For those getting all itchy with answers to the
unanswerable, may you be cursed with a chance to put one to the test.

My decision, in the face of such global hopelessness, is to deepen my
loyalty to community policing. I'll find my gratification in defending
neighbourhoods.

Some of the crime there may be generated by addicts. Free dope might
put a lid on that, but I've seen too many people covered in abscesses
and out of their minds to be the one distributing it. And, truth is,
I'm not done fighting back.

The movie itself? I don't know whose artistic energy is on display --
the director's, scriptwriter's or producer's, but it speaks of
creative genius, percolating in privacy.

In that sense, it's a Hollywood coup. Check it out if reality isn't
wearing you a little thin already. I won't be sitting through a second
time.