The 13th Step - acclaimed movie 'Traffic' relies on old cliches - Critical Essay

Reason, March, 2001 by Nick Gillespie

Even some drug war opponents buy into its lies.

Why is it that ostensibly pro-drug movies can never quite deliver the goods, can never quite depict drug use as something other than depraved? When Trainspotting hit American theaters in 1996, the controversial tale of Scottish heroin junkies was preceded by a storm of controversy about its allegedly positive, consequences-free portrayal of drug use; the evening yak shows and op-ed pages nattered on about its "irresponsible" content and worried about its likely effect on the youth of America. The promise of a drug movie that didn't follow a shopworn moralistic script was precisely the reason I wanted to see the film. Trainspotting, alas, disappointed, though not because it wasn't a thoroughly entertaining, compelling, and at times disturbing drama.

It was all that, to be sure, but it also participated in a long tradition of conflating drug use with addiction and highlighting the seamier sides of drug culture: In one scene, a character sifts through a filthy toilet in a desperate search for a suppository that will get him off; in another, a baby dies due to its junkie parents' neglect.

While the film was thankfully in no way a "hey kids don't do this at home" morality tale, it certainly didn't reflect most people's generally positive experiences with illegal drugs, nor did it make the case for legalization easier. If anything, by dwelling on the dark side of drug use and showing its potential for violence, criminality, and destructiveness, it reinforced the drug warrior mindset.

So it is with Traffic, the new Steven Soderbergh film that's been called "a blistering look at our nation's hypocritical and useless war on drugs" (to quote a typical rave review). Though the movie mounts an extensive and generally effective critique of the drug war in its current, hyper-militarized version, it also recycles a number of hysterical myths about drug use that could have come straight out of an old Dragnet episode.

Released in late December in New York and Los Angeles and nationwide in early January, Traffic has garnered a tremendous critical response, winning recognition from the American Film Institute as one of 2000's outstanding films and a best picture nod from the New York Film Critics Circle. The movie has also done well at the box office, making over $21 million in its first full week of wide release. "Exemplary Hollywood social realism," J. Hoberman approvingly notes in the Village Voice. He's right. Though stylishly photographed and well-acted, the film is, to a large extent, an old-fashioned "message" movie.

Which is to say it is riddled with cliches that ultimately undercut its effectiveness at delivering the news that, as all the main characters say at some point, the War on Drugs is a colossal waste of money, time, and lives that will never succeed in its goal of eradicating drug use. But even as Traffic seeks to chastise those who conceive and prosecute our nation's misguided anti- drug policies--more medical treatment, less police could be the movie's mantra-- it paints illegal drugs as soul-sapping enslavers whose use almost inevitably leads to despair and degradation.

Thus, as the first major motion picture to specifically call the drug war into question and the latest in a long line to demonize actual drug use, Traffic is simultaneously a "breath of fresh air and a...gasp of hysteria," in the words of Associate Editor Jesse Walker (his comments can be read on REASON Online at www.reason.com/hod/jw010501.html). Indeed, only in a context of institutionalized hysteria about illegal drugs--only in a world in which the nation's drug czar signs off on TV scripts, demonstrably worthless programs such as D.A.R.E. put cops in grammar school classrooms, police arrest over a million Americans each year for possession, and tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders languish in state and federal prisons--could such a movie have any power at all to move reviewers or audiences.

As Traffic unfolds over two and a half hours, we watch the intersection of characters, situations, and insights made familiar from other crime flicks: corrupt Mexican cops and army types who are secretly in bed with drug lords; stupid, overconfident U.S. government officials who gravely misjudge situations only to recognize--too late!--the error of their arrogance; U.S. drug agents conflicted by what they recognize is their impossible mission; ruthless drug traffickers who have grown fabulously rich off their trade and acquired the trappings of legitimate businessmen even as they ruthlessly order the deaths of anyone--anyone!--who gets in their way; and the intimation that illegal drugs are "an unbeatable market force," the very apotheosis of consumer capitalism, which itself seems to bring out the worst sort of amoral greed in people.

Traffic's social-realist impulse reaches its nadir in the plot involving Judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), a conservative judge from Cincinnati, Ohio, who is named drug czar. Even as he is jetting to