HELLO MY NAME IS 'TRAFFIC'

Traffic is:

A movie?

Hollywood's version of a white paper on drugs?

An exercise in cinematographic sophistry?

Commentary?

Answer: All of the above.

How good a movie is it? The dialogue is TV quality, the story line silly,
the hero sillier, but it's beautifully filmed: sepia tones for the Mexican
shots, crisp color for the San Diego scenes. There are unsettling, shaky
camera close-ups of -- take your pick -- brooding, puffy, bombastic,
conniving and ineffectual politicians. It's what a good movie should be,
fiction wrapped around plausibilities, fictional characters whose
characters are prodded, tested. Suspense. But, first and foremost, it's a
fiction.

A synopsis: Michael Douglas is the U.S. drug czar, newly appointed. His
daughter is a junkie. He is blind to this fact. He throws himself into his
new job, examines the anti-drug effort and realizes two things. First, it
isn't working. Second, his daughter's a junkie and needs his help. So he
quits and goes home to be a good dad.

The war on drugs, he says in a farewell speech, is really a war on our
families, because our families take drugs. Therefore, he says, he cannot
and will not declare war on his family.

Why Traffic wasn't a three-part made-for-TV movie is a question best left
to film critics. But if you read the newspapers and listen to the talk
shows -- and not just the film critics -- Traffic is far more than a movie.
It's "an expos of the drug trade" according to The New York Times. It was
named the best film of 2000 by numerous critics, picked as an Oscar
front-runner before it was released, before, that is, Americans got to see
a single sepia frame.

Scenes have been cited on talk shows as examples -- source material? -- of
how the United States hasgone wrong in the fight against drugs, as if the
movie is fact, not fiction. Accolades are heaped not only for reasons of
movie excellence but because Traffic is seen by some to haveaccomplished in
less than three hours what 30 years of journalism, film documentaries,
strenuous political dialogue and academic studies have not: It debunks,
with extreme prejudice, the war on drugs.

Actually, it tries to debunk two of the three legs of the anti-narcotics
effort: interdiction and enforcement. Treatment on demand comes away as the
only possible cure to our national narco illness.

On the interdiction front, Traffic proclaims that things are going from bad
to hopeless, mostly through the corruption of our foreign allies in the
drug war and by the sheer quantity of dope crossing our borders. You want
sinister corruption in a movie? Meet General Salazar. And those aerial
shots of hundreds of cars lined up at the Mexican border? Those shots
pretty much capture the futility of interception. Case closed.

On the enforcement front, Traffic portrays U.S. cops as overworked and
quite possibly stupid. The Drug Enforcement Administration is a collection
of nitwits who cannot protect witnesses, build cases, conduct surveillance
or even arrest a bad guy without getting into a shoot-out with local police.

We are indeed doomed. Only treatment can save us.

OK, maybe that's a position that can be argued reasonably by reasonable
people who don't cheat with facts, don't change history and can remove
their rose-colored glasses or at least have the prescription checked. But
Traffic doesn't argue with reason; it argues with hyperbole and distortion.
Remember sophistry from freshman philosophy? This is it, disguised as
entertainment.

Well, you may say, that's fair. It's commentary. Hollywood commentary. One
man's commentary is another man's poison.

But there are rules of engagement in the commentary business. If you cheat,
you lose your credibility. And Traffic cheats.

Joe Toft, who spent seven years as head of the DEA in Bogota, Colombia,
used to give visiting journalists a history lesson. Yes, there's
corruption, he'd say, but there are thousands of good Colombian cops, and
they're dying for American's buying habits. Rather than measure failure by
the percentage of drugs intercepted, consider any interception a partial
success. But most important, Mr. Toft would say, if we let criminals and
narco-terrorists take over the governments of our Latin American neighbors,
we'll have more than a drug war on our hands; we'll have international chaos.

In fact, Traffic grossed more in its first weekend -- $17.5 million -- than
the projected lifetime earnings of more than 1,000 Colombian police
murdered in the early 1990s by Pablo Escobar, the cocaine smuggler who ran
the Medellin Cartel. Those cops earned about $1,000 a year. Most were in
their 20s when they died. They died because real Americans, not movie
creations, demanded -- and received -- drugs from criminals. There is an
inescapable and direct link between the buying habits of American drug
users and the death rate of police in Latin America.

Traffic might have pointed this out, but the filmmakers chose instead to
make a victim of Michael Douglas's screen family. Yes, the Michael Douglas
character should have paid more attention to his daughter. But he also had
a job to do, a job he quit.

Imagine if instead of quitting, Mr. Douglas had said in his speech: "We're
going to expand treatment programs, yes. But if you sell drugs to my
daughter, if you sell drugs to the children of America, we will hunt you
down, indict you, convict you and put you away, because you have declared
war on our children."

You wonder, would Traffic have been released if that speech had been
written into the script?

The film took at least $17 million off the streets in its first weekend. It
soon will gross more than $100 million. That's the sort of big money drug
cartels make from selling their brand of mind-bending fiction. Traffic, of
course, is harmless entertainment.

Or is it?