-Caveat Lector- From http://www.lewrockwell.com/healy/healy11.html }}>Begin "Traffic": This Is Your Government on Drugs Reviewed by Gene Healy A Hollywood blockbuster with a laudable political message? Is it possible? Believe it or not, it is. The movie is Steven Soderberg’s "Traffic," and its message is that the war on drugs is a hideous failure. Libertarian cinema buffs will want to know the answer to two questions: (1) Is "Traffic" a good film? (2) Is it effective anti-drug-war propaganda? The answer to both is a qualified yes. "Traffic" tracks the lives of various combatants and civilians in the drug war, some of whose paths intersect only tangentially, if at all. Michael Douglas plays the newly appointed U.S. Drug Czar, whose prep-school daughter descends into crack addiction as dad tries to adjust to his new job. Catherine Zeta-Jones (too pregnant during the filming to play Douglas’s daughter, apparently) is a young woman whose husband, unbeknownst to her, has been running much of the Southern California drug trade. Benecio Del Toro plays an honest Mexican cop (yeah, yeah, but it’s a movie) trying to stay alive and do a little good as he feeds a corrupt Mexican general to the DEA. The film shifts rapidly from subplot to subplot throughout. At times, this moves the story along briskly; other times, it seems a little too brisk – as if designed for a stoner’s attention span. The jagged, hand-held-camerawork is unsettling – intentionally and effectively so. But the use of a yellow filter to shoot the Mexican scenes was pretty unsubtle: "Look: we’re in Mexico now. See how everything looks dingy?" Happily, whatever weaknesses the film has are largely redeemed by the performance of Benecio Del Toro as Javier Rodriguez, the Mexican cop. Who knew that Del Toro, heretofore largely a B-movie bottom-dweller (see this year’s straight-to-video Way of the Gun. Or don’t.), had the stuff of greatness in him? With his bleary eyes, his hangdog face, and his air of infinite weariness, Del Toro makes the perfect noir antihero. So "Traffic" is well worth seeing, independent of its message. How does it play as agitprop? How many of the key decriminalization arguments appear here, and how effectively are they presented? The film is at its best demonstrating the futility of the drug war. It’s often been said that the drug warriors are doomed to failure because they’re socialists battling entrepreneurs; but it’s never been illustrated as dramatically as it is in "Traffic." Early on, a drug magnate turned government witness describes how he and his Mexican counterparts performed sophisticated statistical analyses on the likelihood of any individual courier getting caught, and simply flooded the system with enough mules to make the losses profitable. Later, another character displays the latest in high-tech smuggling: a child’s doll that appears to be plastic, but is actually made out of pressurized, impacted cocaine. The dolls are to be sent over by the truckload, and reconverted to powder stateside. Shortly after that scene, as the camera pans back, showing the vast line of cars waiting to pass through the customs station and enter the U.S., the absurdity of federal interdiction efforts becomes manifest. In its portrayal of addiction, however, the film stumbles, and unintentionally undermines its decriminalizationist message. It’s one thing – and entirely believable – for Caroline Wakefield (Erika Christensen), the Drug Czar’s teenage daughter, to be a drug user. Jim Bovard’s Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years has a three-page list of prominent politicians’ kids who’ve been busted for possession and/or dealing in the last several years, and let off scot-free (pp. 103-105). But does Caroline have to become a full-fledged crack whore? That’s not a figure of speech: in the space of a few weeks, the 16-year-old Caroline goes from booze and bong hits with her plaid-wearing, country-day-school friends, to turning tricks in a Cincinnati hot-pillow joint. What is this, an after-school special? Is it too much to expect a movie that’s honest about the drug war to be honest about drugs? It’s certainly inadvisable to smoke crack, but there’s little evidence that one hit instantly turns an honors student into Robert Downey Jr. As psychologist Stanton Peele has pointed out, government data show that crack is no more habit-forming than powder cocaine – and neither is habit-forming enough to warrant hysteria. The NIH-funded National Institute on Drug Abuse surveys show that "in 1999, ten (9.8) percent of high school seniors report that they have ever used cocaine, and five (4.6) percent have used crack. In the last 30 days, three (2.6) percent used cocaine while one (1.1) percent used crack." As Peele explains, the figures show that "even with this youthful population, fewer than a third of those who have used crack used it in the last month." Soderberg’s decision to take a "Reefer Madness" approach to crack is regrettable. Your average, nonideological American may well come out of the theatre thinking that the drug war’s a losing battle, but if it saves just one well-scrubbed middle-class child from the depravity depicted onscreen, then dammit, it’s worth fighting. "Traffic" would have sent a more powerful message to SUV Nation had Soderberg focused more on the growing US police state engendered by the drug war. The American cops portrayed in the movie are dedicated, well-meaning public servants; drug prohibition apparently only causes police corruption down in Mexico (where everything’s a seedy yellow color). Would it have been so hard for Soderberg to include a tyrannical federal prosecutor coercing confessions through use of the criminal forfeiture statutes and mandatory minimum sentences? Or a pack of donut-munching paramilitaries kicking down the wrong door and terrorizing a law-abiding family? Well, you can’t have everything. Even if it doesn’t make the best possible case against the drug war, "Traffic" may introduce the idea of decriminalization to many people who would otherwise accept prohibition as a given. And that’s a start. January 12, 2001 Gene Healy is an attorney practicing in Northern Virginia. Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com End<{{ A<>E<>R Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects. 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