/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/FILM-US: Make Smart Policy, Not War

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Jan 16 2001 (IPS) - It is an open secret that the United States is taking a serious beating in its so-called war on drugs. The jails have never been more overcrowded, and by all accounts, no significant dent has been made in the number of users.

A new 1.3-billion-dollar (mostly military) US aid package for Colombia raises the spectre of worsening the civil war and human rights abuses there, if not eradicating coca production.

Director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film ‘Traffic’ is a long overdue critique of the current approach, and deserves praise for taking a clear- eyed look at the pitfalls of classifying the problem in criminal terms. But it also misses the boat on some of the drug war’s most devastating consequences.

Based on a British television mini-series of the same name that sought to trace the entire food chain of the drug trade, from South America’s jungles to Europe’s back alleys, ‘Traffic’ uses documentary techniques to weave parallel story lines into a wide-angle snapshot of the drug war and its shortcomings.

But while it touches on the difficulty – if not impossibility – of avoiding corruption within the ranks of law enforcement, for example, that corruption seems restricted to south of the US border. The conflicting agendas and lack of communication between rival agencies like the DEA and CIA are likewise given short shrift.

‘Traffic’ stars Michael Douglas as Robert Wakefield, the just- appointed head of the National Office of Drug Control Policy (a job currently held by Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who will shortly be replaced himself).

Unbeknownst at first to the new US drug czar, Wakefield’s teenaged daughter Caroline is cultivating a major cocaine habit thanks to her cynical boyfriend – causing Wakefield to wonder at the end of the film “how you wage war on your family”.

Trying to get a handle on his new post, Wakefield consults the usual Beltway suspects (including cameos by Utah’s conservative Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and California Democrat Barbara Boxer), and slowly realises that no one seems able to “think outside the box” of a lock ’em up and throw away the key policy.

Lip service is paid to the idea of drugs as a public health issue, but Wakefield quickly notes that his staff does not include any experts on rehabilitation or counselling.

Rounding out the cast are Catherine Zeta-Jones as an upwardly mobile housewife who discovers that her husband, Carlos Ayala, is a drug smuggler on par with Pablo Escobar, Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman as a pair of DEA agents assigned to protect the government’s reluctant star witness against Ayala, and Tomas Milian as a dryly ruthless Mexican general.

Arguably the best performance, however, is Benicio del Toro as Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez, a beleaguered Tijuana police officer. We meet Rodriguez as he and his partner have just seized a truckload of cocaine in the arid Baja California region, only to have it casually taken away again by General Arturo Salazar (Milian) – obviously a routine event.

Salazar is eventually tapped by Wakefield to act as his counterpart in Mexico, only to have it all fall apart when Rodriguez fingers the general as the mastermind behind a gangland-style war between two rival drug cartels in Tijuana. That US authorities would have no idea that “our man in Mexico”, so to speak, was a vicious, notorious criminal strains credulity.

Other false or exploitative moments in the film include a speech by Caroline’s boyfriend in which he chastises Wakefield for contemptuously referring to an impoverished African American ghetto as “this place” – as in “how could you bring my daughter to this place?”

But instead of making a real argument for why inner cities have become the nation’s illicit pharmacies, the teenager instead gives a silly speech about supply and demand that vastly over-simplifies the problem.

Likewise, a scene toward the end of the film in which the baby- faced, white Caroline flees rehab and ends up trading sex for drugs to a black street dealer – who seems to lack the smallest shred of humanity – invokes some fairly threadbare stereotypes.

‘Traffic’ also fails to emphasise one of the most palpable outcomes of the punitive approach to drugs, namely, the millions of Americans languishing in prison for non-violent drug offences.

Whether President-elect George W. Bush will engage in a thoughtful re-examination of the issue of drugs or continue on the current course remains to be seen with his appointment of the next drug czar.

But if no one has all the answers, ‘Traffic’ at least knows which questions to ask.