War on Drugs/Traffic Ever Since

War on Drugs/Traffic

Ever since President Richard Nixon uttered the phrase "war on drugs," the world has been embroiled in one of the most ridiculous and costly campaigns of the past century. A war on drugs is, as Robert Wakefield states in his ten-point plan speech at the end of the film Traffic, a war on members of our own families. Steven Soderbergh's 2000 film encapsulates the senselessness of the war on drugs brilliantly, perhaps better than any other film ever made. Winner of several Academy and Golden Globe awards including those for best director and screenplay, Traffic shows how the war on drugs has degenerated into a meaningless political and financial mess. Drug cartels like the Tijuana Obregon depicted in Traffic are the ostensible targets. However well-meaning drug "czars" like Wakefield might be, the actual victims in the war are average American citizens and even the sons and daughters of prominent politicians. In Traffic Soderbergh illustrates with dramatic clarity how drug use is universal and addiction crosses lines of class, race and gender. One of the strengths of the movie is its lack of stereotyping: such as portraying Wakefield's own daughter as an addict instead of a brown-skinned male living in an inner-city ghetto.

Moreover, the structure of the film reflects the real consequences of the war on drugs. Soderbergh links together several seemingly disparate stories of Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials, Mexican cops, big-time dealers state-side, and corrupt cops. By showing how their different lives impact each other, Soderbergh illustrates the tangled web the war on drugs weaves. The war on drugs affects the lives of all Americans, even those who have no contact with dealers or DEA agents or who have never touched a line of cocaine. Millions of bright Americans rot in jail for simple offenses related to drugs: creating a situation in which lives are lost because of an attempt to legislate morality and regulate trade of certain mind-altering substances. The film brings to mind the futility of the 21st Amendment to the Constitution and the prohibition era. Prohibition of alcohol boosted organized crime because the alcohol trade was pushed underground to the only businessmen willing to take the risks necessary to peddle wares everyone wanted to begin with. Similarly, the war on drugs has pushed underground a cross-border trade of substances that could better be dealt with by sensible legislation.

The film also neglects to mention some of the most important casualties of the war on drugs: those millions of mainly poor Americans whose lives are ruined because of barbaric drug laws. Although the war on drugs is ostensibly waged to fight cartels, the program mainly means catching small-time offenders who might somehow become valuable informants to law enforcement and DEA officials. Apprehending small-time offenders for possession or small-scale sales would seem to minimize the main consumers of drugs. Yet as Soderbergh and Traffic show so brutally, consumers of drugs come from all walks of life. Many drug users never become addicts and those who do are not criminals; they are human beings in need of sympathy, support, and understanding. Wakefield's daughter becomes a powerful character in the film because she proves to her father that the war on drugs fails to address the root cause of addiction.

Traffic therefore addresses several separate but interrelated issues: addiction, organized crime, law enforcement and legislation. Addiction is a fact of life; human beings become hooked on any number of legal and illegal substances. Banning drugs is no way to combat addiction. Therefore, the war on drugs does absolutely nothing to help people who use drugs to fulfill psychological needs. People who want drugs to ease their pain can always find them: on the black market or on the mainstream consumer market in the form of alcohol or prescription medications.

Organized crime is a genuine social problem that law enforcement officials worldwide must learn to deal with. Ironically, though, the war on drugs bolsters organized crime rings. The value of drug trafficking skyrockets when dealers have to risk their lives to move product. If drugs were legal, regulated like any other substance by fair rules of international trade and scrutinized by world health organizations, then organized crime would have no vested interest in drugs whatsoever. Organized crime is not a philosophy or religion; it is a business model. Remove the source of profit, and the model falls apart.