THERE'S a war on, in case you didn't know. We don't get too many reports from the front lines, but it is a war nonetheless. Well, maybe not a war. Let's call it an effort. Our country's anti-drug campaign is far too feeble to call it a war. If it were an NBA team, it would be the L.A. Clippers. We spend billions of dollars every year with little to no overall effect. Our prison population continues to explode due to a constant inflow of nonviolent drug users whose only crime thus far has been their own sickness and/or weakness in the face of temptation. We need to, as Michael Douglas says in Steven Soderbergh's brilliant Traffic, start thinking outside the box.
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It is fascinating and often entertaining to hear all the solutions people can come up with. From the Left you hear about legalization of marijuana, legalization of all drugs, free needles, and the like. On the Right, we get solutions such as a further escalation of this "war," crop eradication, mandatory minimum sentences and other equally well-intended but ultimately futile suggestions. The bickering between the two sides is not helping the situation now and will not resolve the issue in the future. If our country is ever going to arrive at a permanent solution to this national cancer, we have to be honest with ourselves and determine just who the real enemies are.
There are a lot of good things one could say about Traffic. Chief among them was the fact that Soderbergh and the screenwriters did not use this movie as a platform to offer their own prescription to this national crisis. There is nothing inherently wrong with offering solutions to problems. But when it comes to the drug problems, the overwhelming majority of the time what we hear are all-or-nothing solutions. It is either legalize everything or death penalty to pot smokers. Soderbergh simply shows us the harsh reality and lets us draw most of the conclusions ourselves.
One conclusion that is painfully clear to anyone who has followed the war on drugs is that it is not one we can win under the current strategy. The drug culture has seeped so far into American life that it will require a fundamental attitude change at every level of society. Parents will have to be far more vigilant about what their children are doing at all times. Politicians and government officials somehow will have to summon the courage to admit to themselves and to their constituents that marijuana is not the same as cocaine, which is not the same as LSD, which is not the same as heroin.
The nation should treat the pure abuse of drugs for what it is - a sickness and a weakness. If we continue to treat drug use as a crime only, rather than a crime and a public health matter, our prisons will continue to grow. For safety's sake, we first need to put drug users in coerced treatment facilities, not prison. If a user simply refuses to clean himself up, then prison time should be an option. As a first resort, we should leave the cages for the criminals that belong there and get sick people the help they can use.
As idealistic as that sounds, changing drug laws and enforcement policies is the easy part.
The hard part is the attitude change that we all will have to make. One of the most accurate parts of Traffic was the fact that the teenage girl in question was an overachiever from a wealthy suburban family, but suffered from two seemingly inattentive and na
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