HOLLYWOOD TRUTH ABOUT DRUGS

Two years ago, Washington DC went to the polls for the mid-term
elections.

There wasn't much excitement, since we aren't allowed a seat in
Congress and the city council has little real power, but it's possible
to place "initiatives" on the ballot, and one of these called for the
legalising of medical marijuana. I was interested to see how the vote
would go.

I was even more interested to see that the vote was an official
secret. The following day, while reporting the result of the local and
ward elections, a tiny inside-page newspaper item announced that the
ballots for the marijuana initiative had been counted but then
impounded. How had the city voted? We are not telling you!

A law professor friend of mine had to sue in order to have the ballots
released, which took ages. It turned out that the capital city of the
free world had voted by a majority of about 60 per cent to
decriminalise marijuana for medical purposes. (I had actually guessed
that, from the fact that the voters were denied knowledge of how their
votes had "counted", as we now say.)

This surreal episode crystallised both the hysteria of the "war on
drugs" and the astounding level of denial that is imposed on any
discussion of it. Tens of thousands of Americans are in prison for
merely possessing or growing a weed that is at worst harmless, and at
best a specific medicine for glaucoma and for the violent nausea that
accompanies chemotherapy. Hundreds of thousands more are in jail for
taking part in the "traffic" that supplies this and other harder
narcotics to an insatiable market of consumers. The "war" on this
practice, which began under President Nixon in one of his
law-and-order phases, has shown no sign of abating in three decades
and American troops are now being sent as far south as Colombia in an
effort to eradicate the product at the supply end, as well.

Maybe I choose my friends with insufficient care, but I have never
even met anyone who has ever met anyone who thinks that this "war"
makes a particle of sense. Very few of my acquaintances use narcotics,
but not one of them would experience the least difficulty in getting
hold of them. And this is the very discovery that comes - too late -
to the Michael Douglas character in the new movie Traffic, which may
do to the "drug war" what certain Roaring Twenties films did for
Prohibition - in other words, expose it as a corrupting and dangerous
racket.

Douglas plays a tough but stupid Mid-Western judge who is appointed to
be America's "Drug Tsar" (and what a wealth of meaning is contained in
that silly but sinister job description). As he moves towards the
centre of ostensible power in Washington, a series of grainy and sepia
sequences show the rest of the country as it gaily buys and sells
drugs. Much of the action is set on the Mexican frontier and it
becomes clear that, rather than American policy inhibiting the
south-of-the-border drug cartels, the constant attrition is leading to
the Mexicanisation of the United States.

A sorry subplot involves Douglas's daughter becoming "involved" with
drugs and then with sex; two phenomena which the leading man confronts
(rather woodenly) as if he's never heard of them before. His
off-screen bride, the then heavily pregnant Catherine Zeta Jones,
plays the ruthless wife of a narcotics tycoon. The slightly creaky
plot does not obscure the main point, which is that official anti-drug
policy is futile at best, and corrupt at worst, resulting in contempt
for unenforceable laws and in the manipulation of policemen by
incredibly rich criminals. In a crucial scene on his official plane,
surrounded by representatives of every possible US government agency,
the mighty "Tsar" asks people to speak their minds off the record -
and is greeted with silence.

This dumb silence has lasted through six real-life presidencies, but
now shows every sign of being broken. A rebellion against the
stupidity of the "war on drugs" is the next big thing in American
politics and society. Every time the first step - the
decriminalisation of marijuana - has been put to a vote it has been
carried with large majorities, even in states as conservative as New
Mexico. In each case the Government has intervened to nullify the
local vote, but in many more cases respected politicians and
opinion-form-ers have sprung up to express dissent. Interestingly, the
most prominent to date have been Republicans, as senior as former
Secretary of State George Shultz and as conservative as William
Buckley. The military operation in Colombia was widely criticised in
Congress and the Press. One has the sense of a long-standing taboo
beginning to lose its power.

Two things above all have become noticeable in the dayto-day "war".
Its effect falls disproportionately on the poor and the black, whose
cheap "crack" cocaine draws heavier sentences than the more costly
powdered version. And, because transactions between buyer and seller
are voluntary and mutually agreed, police departments must rely very
heavily on informers, and even provocateurs, to secure convictions.
This last point, very strongly emphasised in Traffic, means that minor
players are subjected to blackmail and reprisal as part of "plea
bargains", in which the big fish swim free. In his last round of
presidential pardons, Clinton released two women from life sentences
handed out for committing, in effect, no crime except knowledge of
their boyfriends' dope-selling activities. He also gave an interview
to Rolling Stone, in which he said that non-violent drug-users ought
not to be crowding America's groaning prison system. Straws in the
wind, perhaps,

But the political class has been lagging behind public opinion for
years on this issue, and it might be that Hollywood has now provided
the catalyst where the tide of the argument will slowly begin to turn.