BALANCED LOOK AT DRUG WAR

FRONTLINE: DRUG WARS 10 p.m. Monday and Tuesday Ch. 9

9 p.m. Oct. 16 and 23 Ch. 54

NEW YORK -- After three decades, the war on drugs is largely a bust.

That's one finding of "Drug Wars," an epic exploration into the U.S.
government's battle to stem the flow of illegal drugs.

Examinations of the drug problem are usually framed from the perspective of
the users or the cops who bust them on the street.

But the four-hour "Frontline" report, which PBS airs tonight and Tuesday,
lets viewers hear from high-level government officials and traffickers,
drug agents and drug lords, including men who once headed Colombia's
notorious Medellin cartel, which the film identifies as the world's
largest-ever criminal syndicate.

More than a year in the making, "Drug Wars" takes an inside look at the
drug business, including footage of the ambush of an entire division of
Mexico's federal drug police by a unit of the Mexican army protecting a
drug operation.

Nixon era start

The story begins in the first days of Richard Nixon's presidency.

"You can imagine the challenge trying to lay out for an audience the last
30 years," says reporter and co-producer Lowell Bergman, adding, "I think
people will be surprised that Nixon turns out to be the most effective in
terms of getting control of a particular drug, in this case heroin."

In 1970, a controversial program of dispensing to addicts the new synthetic
opiate methadone was launched by a White House concerned that, outside its
door, the nation's capital had become the crime capital. A year after
clinics opened around Washington, burglaries had dropped by 41 percent.

The message seemed clear. With treatment, addicts could be helped to
overcome their habit. And while they were helped, they no longer had to
steal to support that habit -- nor were they supporting illegal drug trade.

Even so, Nixon wasn't ready to launch a national methadone treatment
program. Then, a year later, he was shocked to learn of raging heroin use
by American troops in Vietnam. This put a far more sympathetic face on the
junkie.

With that, the law-and-order president unveiled a drug program that
addressed drug abuse as a sickness, not a crime. And as the sonorous
"Frontline" narrator declares, "For the first and only time in the history
of U.S. drug policy, treatment supplanted law enforcement for most of the
attention and most of the money."

Better strategy

While Bergman insists that "Drug Wars" draws no particular conclusions, he
says he and his collaborators were struck by an unexpected argument echoed
by virtually every drug-enforcement official they talked to: The better
strategy is trying to reduce demand rather than shut off supply and punish
consumers. Nixon, it seems, had started on the right track.

In the film, former Drug Enforcement Administration head Jack Lawn calls
for a new, centralized anti-drug force that devotes a full 90 percent of
its budget to education, treatment and prevention.

"Would that work? We won't know unless we try it," Lawn says. "But 20 years
of doing it the other way certainly has not worked."

What happened to derail Nixon's treatment-oriented strategy? As the 1972
election approached, the White House reverted to a more voter-friendly
approach: Get tough on drugs and anyone who does them.

That has summed up the nation's drug policy ever since. "No one wants to be
seen as soft on crime," Bergman says.

The film compiles some of the consequences. The United States fights the
drug war with a bureaucracy that, next year, will total 51 government
agencies spending some $20 billion in federal money.

The U.S. prison population has doubled since 1994 to nearly 2 million
inmates -- half of whom are jailed on drug-related charges. Meanwhile, the
global narcotics business is worth about $400 billion, and rapidly expanding.