The
War on Drugs has been exposed as a fraud in Traffic,
which is based in part on the 1990 BBC miniseries Traffik,
which focused on drug traffic from Pakistan to Britain. Directed
by Steven Soderbergh, whose Erin
Brockovich was nominated for two awards earlier
this year by the Political Film Society, the movie centers
around conservative Ohio Supreme Court Justice Robert Wakefield
(played by Michael Douglas), who has just been appointed to
head the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy,
in the expectation that he would read well-scripted balderdash;
the White House Chief of Staff (played by Albert Finney) who
hired him doubtless knew that problems in the Wakefield household,
which we discover in due course, would restrain his ardor
for headlines. Wakefield sees the war on three but not all
fronts, because short cuts go to the real "battle lines" in
San Diego and Tijuana, about which he learns nothing during
the film. The first front consists of experts in Washington,
D.C., who are funding the War on Drugs to the tune of $45
billion annually, with cameos from Republican Senators Charles
Grassley, Orrin Hatch and Don Nickles as well as Democratic
Senator Barbara Boxer. The second front consists of Drug Enforcement
Administration officers and other officials in the field,
who do their duty. The third front is the home front, as Wakefield’s
daughter Caroline (played by Erika Christensen), a sixteen-year-old
honor student at a private school, can get drugs and sex more
easily than alcohol, and she wants to go that route (joining
one-fourth of all American teenagers today) because her parents,
including a mother Barbara (played by Amy Irving) who experimented
with drugs in college, seem too busy with their own lives
to care about her. But there are two more fronts -- one in
San Diego and the other in México. In San Diego, the kingpin
is Carlos Ayala (played by Steven Bauer), who has been indicted
on various charges; his pregnant wife, Helena (played by Catherine
Zeta-Jones), then realizes that her husband is a drug lord.
When the film shifts to México, the technicolor changes to
tobacco brown, and we view rival gangs seeking to control
the drug trade. The Obregón gang is in charge of the Tijuana
Cartel; Juan Obregón (played by Benjamin Bratt) ruthlessly
tries to restrain a rival Mexican cartel, headquartered near
the Texas border, from eliminating him. General Arturo Salazar
(played by Tomás Milián), presumably the anti-drug tsar of
México, in reality is allied with the Obregón’s adversaries,
the Juarez Cartel. With so many different stories, which may
confuse filmviewers, the plot is not what is memorable about
the film. Instead, the most profound messages are conveyed
by some of the least prominent characters. The Washington
front is exposed as trying to criminalize the drug traffic
while knowing next to nothing about the realities; platitudes
of the Senators provide solid evidence of their naïveté. The
front employing bureaucrats at the border consists of officials
who are more honest, confessing that their resources are piddling
compared to the vast profits of drug lords on both sides of
the border and thus that most drug smuggling gets through
the border, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). Wakefield notes, while listening to a deafening silence
after his call for new ideas from the bureaucrats, that none
of the agencies has supplied anyone for his field trip who
specializes in drug rehabilitation. But
when Wakefield tries to play vigilante to save his daughter
from drug addiction, her boyfriend Seth Abrams (played by
Topher Grace) urges him to back off, as the profits made in
the ghettoes from the sale of drugs are too lucrative for
any police sweep to eradicate; indeed, only an unthinkable
but systematic sweep of all white neighborhoods for drugs
would stop the profits from the traffic. At the San Diego
front, mid-level drug dealer Eduardo Ruiz (played by Miguel
Ferrer) is captured by Drug Enforcement Administration agents
Montel Gordon (played by Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (played
by Luis Guzmán) and immunized to testify against his boss,
Carlos Ayala. Helena arranges to kill Ruiz, and Ayala is released,
demonstrating that American drug kingpins have infinite resources
to avoid conviction and that any law enforcement action is
bound to place American government officials in the position
of allies of one or another faction in México seeking to control
the distribution. American law enforcement, in other words,
consists of show trials that merely remove some drug lords,
but others will simply take their place. The Mexican front
shows that the crackdown on drugs in the United States serves
to intensify the struggle for control among drug lords, who
bribe officials and kill rivals to gain control. Mexican drug
enforcement officials based in Tijuana, notably Javier Rodriguez
(played by Benicio Del Toro), have to walk a tightrope to
survive, a lesson that Javier’s partner Manolo Sanchez (played
by Jacob Vargas) only learns as he is killed by agents of
General Salazar. Ultimately, Wakefield comes to his senses
when he sees his daughter spaced out on drugs in a flophouse.
He delivers a prepared speech to the press, full of platitudes,
and then stops midway to say that the solution to the problem
lies within American families. He then abruptly walks out
of the White House press conference without finishing his
speech or answering questions. In the closing frames of
Traffic, when the color returns to the blue-gray
of the world of middle-class whites and official Washington,
the daughter is at a Drugs Anonymous meeting alongside her
mother and father. When asked to say something after his daughter
has spoken, giving thanks that she made through another day,
Wakefield says that he is present to give support to his daughter.
In short, Traffic is heavy medicine for a country
divided between affluent addicts and naïve adults who want
to criminalize drug addiction and then throw money at the
problem in a self-righteous gesture, with a message that the
War on Drugs has already been won by the drug lords. The tagline
of the film, "No one gets away clean," hits the nail on the
head, as the problem is that the demand for drugs creates
the supply. The Political Film Society has nominated Traffic
as best film exposé of the year 2000. MH
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