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"Traffic"
12/22/00
Christian Ettinger for DRCNet "Traffic," the soon-to-be released Hollywood film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, merits the attention of drug policy reform activists. An ambitious, sprawling, and panoramic overview of the drug war, the film dives into the tragedy and hypocrisy of the War on Drugs like no Hollywood movie before it. The film's nationwide release in the coming weeks is certain to spark popular interest in drug policy, and that represents an opportunity which drug policy reformers should seize. "Traffic" is, at different times, heavy-handed, shrill, and melodramatic, and it carries mixed messages -- it is, after all, a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. But its bottom line -- after all the tragicomic scenes of a futile War on Drugs in action in Mexico, on the border, on America's streets, and in Washington's corridors of power -- is that the War on Drugs is doomed to failure. Instead, the film implicitly argues that a harm reduction approach centered on drug treatment is a more realistic approach for reducing substance abuse and its attendant harms. Ironically, some of the politicians who designed the current drug policy and the armed bureaucrats who implement it have walk-on roles as themselves in the film. Do they realize their dogma is being questioned? According to the Associated Press, the filmmakers got Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) appear in the film by telling his staff, "the movie will be about how drugs destroy families." The AP story goes on to say the film has an anti-drug message, but that is an oversimplification. True, in some scenes that could have come from "Reefer Madness," teens fall victim to the allure of drugs. But to call "Traffic" an anti-drug movie misses the film's primary message, pounded into the viewer with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, that the War on Drugs must end. The film's plot centers on Michael Douglas as a reluctant Drug Czar whose high school age honor student daughter dabbles in drugs and then in an absurdly short time becomes a full fledged crack whore at the mercy of her demonic African-American drug dealer. This is the kind of cautionary tale that fueled the drug war to begin with, and it reads as if written by Barry McCaffrey himself. McCaffrey also could have scripted the lurid scenes of the Drug Czar's daughter and her prep school friends progressing with astounding speed from smoking pot to using speedballs, a mixture of cocaine and heroin. In its typically unsubtle fashion, the movie manages to bring in both the racial-sexual fears that envelop drug war zealots and the "gateway drug" theory. If those scenes are to be believed, any teenage girl who tries marijuana is one step away from ruin. While these cartoonish scenes certainly convey an anti-drug message out of the 1930s, it is unlikely that Sen. Hatch and other drug warrior senators will like the way the movie plays out. Watching his daughter's deterioration does not turn Douglas into an even more zealous drug warrior -- far from it. Instead, Douglas comes to see his job, his office, and the drug war as a sham. In addition to Hatch's appearance, in fact, is a cameo by well-known drug war critic Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation. (Ed: Well-known in some circles, anyway. According to the gossip columns, the Screen Actors Guild is threatening to fine the film's producers $500 each for allowing Nadelmann, as well as journalist J.D. Podolsky, to play themselves. Under union rules, Nadelmann and Podolsky are not well known enough to play themselves, and should have been portrayed by union actors. Sorry, Ethan.) Just as the film-makers provide both anti-drug abuse and anti-drug war messages, they also try to have it both ways in the production notes used to promote the film. "Everybody who read the script -- whether from the political right or left, law enforcement or drug addicts -- thought the script was on their side," said screenwriter Stephen Gaghan in the notes. Producer Laura Bickford agrees, "What was curious about the reaction to the script was that everybody felt it represented their point of view. The DEA, which gave us enormous support, felt it was one of the most truthful things they'd ever read about what it's like to be in law enforcement fighting the fight." But if the DEA liked the script, it may therefore believe its mission is futile. In an example of art imitating life, scenes portraying the Mexican drug czar as himself a corrupt drug dealer drive home the point that trying to stop the flow of drugs is like trying to plow the sea. In one of the most eloquently stunning scenes in the film, Douglas, headed back to Washington after a fact-finding mission in Mexico, asks his policy experts whether they have any new ideas or strategies. The silence is deafening. Gaghan does concede in the notes that after researching the issue and speaking with drug policy makers, he found, "Speaking candidly nobody thought the current policies were working --nobody." "We're trying to be as dispassionate as we can," added Soderbergh. But he sang a slightly different tune in a recent interview with Salon. "I came away from this process thinking, 'All right let's talk about realistic stuff.' Stuff like Prop. 36 (the California initiative passed this year that offers diversion to treatment programs for nonviolent drug offenders); finding a way to look at this as a health care issue, not a criminal issue; something other than filling up prisons with nonviolent users." Salon critic Jeff Stark sums up the film's message well: "'Traffic' is the first mainstream, major Hollywood production that has come out and said that America's drug war is not winnable. The film argues both implicitly and explicitly that going after the suppliers and the drug traffickers -- where the US spends the bulk of its $19-billion-a-year budget -- simply doesn't work, that it kills innocents and turns others into criminals, that it devastates poor neighborhoods, that it can't stop or even attenuate an insatiable social maw of illicit drug use" (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2000/12/20/traffic_essay/). Despite the filmmaker's protestations, Stark writes that their intentions were unambiguous. "Soderbergh and Gaghan have a clear opinion and neither are holding back -- they're not afraid to risk sounding didactic in service of what they consider a moral high ground." The New York Film Critics Circle agrees with Stark. When they awarded "Traffic" the prize for best picture, they called the film an indictment of the drug war, not an indictment of drugs or drug users. "Traffic" is by no means a perfect film, but it does provide a huge potential opening to expand popular consciousness of the evils of the drug war and the search for better answers. "Traffic" opens in New York and Los Angeles next week and nationally in January.
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