'Traffic' exposes war on drugs |
Melinda Hawkins |
|
Nominated for five Academy Awards, the film Traffic, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is not your typical Hollywood movie. Traffic feels like an intricate documentary, and it asks a series of difficult questions without making any attempt to answer them. Based on a British TV miniseries, Traffic has been described as "a movie with a mission," and it fulfils its mission by illustrating the intractable complications inherent in our policies on drug trafficking and realistically confronts some of the most troubling aspects of our nation's interdiction efforts in Mexico, showing in detail how the drug war has escalated the violence and corruption in the black market drug trade. The war on drugs has been going on for more than three decades. Today, nearly 500,000 Americans are imprisoned on drug charges. In 1980 the number was 50,000. Last year $40 billion in taxpayer dollars were spent in fighting the war on drugs. As a result of our incarceration obsession, the United States operates the largest prison system on the planet, and the U.S. nonviolent prisoner population is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska. Try to imagine the Drug Enforcement Administration erecting razor wire barricades around two states to control crime and you'll get the picture. An unsettling trend addressed in the movie "Traffic" is the criminalization of our children. According to the U.S. Dept of Justice, the number of offenders under age 18 imprisoned for drug offenses increased twelvefold from 1985 to 1997. The group most affected by this propensity for incarceration is African-Americans. From 1985 to 1997, the percentage of African-American young people put in prison increased from 53 to 62 percent. When a society begins to regard its children with "zero tolerance," it is time for that society to reassess its priorities. It is society's job to protect children, not to treat them as criminals for engaging in experimental behavior, which is, after all, an integral part of becoming an adult. With the war on drugs perpetuating a crisis of crowding in our nation's prisons and juvenile facilities, children are more likely to be held in adult prisons with little or no separation from the adult population, leaving them open to abuse by violent criminals. Our interdiction efforts, in which we try to stop drugs at the source, have also been a costly failure. The international illicit drug business generates as much as $400 billion in trade annually, according to the United Nations International Drug Control Program. That amounts to 8 percent of all international trade. Furthermore, the United States has 19,924 kilometers of shoreline, 300 ports of entry and more than 7,500 miles of border with Mexico and Canada, which makes any attempt to stop drugs from entering the country a logistical nightmare. Attempts to police these entry points have resulted in the troubling movement towards militarizing our national police force. Richard Nixon, who was the first president to declare a war on drugs, started this trend in 1971 when he proclaimed drug trafficking to be a threat to national security. Today, 89 percent of police departments have paramilitary units, and 46 percent have been trained by active duty armed forces. The most common use of paramilitary units is serving drug-related search warrants, which usually involve no-knock entries into private homes. These unannounced raids often degenerate into violence between the invading officers and the residents of the raided home. One of the issues best addressed by the film Traffic is the corruption the war on drugs has created in our national police force. On average, half of all police officers convicted as a result of FBI-led corruption cases between 1993 and 1997 were convicted for drug-related offenses. When we consider that drug traffickers earn gross profit margins of up to 300 percent, and add to that the potential profit from asset seizure, the reasons for corruption becomes obvious. By setting up a system ripe for abuse, we are effectively causing the wholesale corruption of the people who are supposed to protect us. Needless to say, this effects more than our wallets. Corruption in the police has a tragic affect in that it encourages violence through unaccountability. We can see the effects of this exploitative system in the escalation of incidents in which the police are accused of assaulting or even murdering civilians. Police brutality has increased at a shocking rate throughout the United States, with the majority of the casualties in urban areas, where police forces have become the most militarized. The film "Traffic" shows us the drug war in all of its ugliness. The myriad of harm caused by this brutal domestic war is so overwhelming that it is impossible to find a good that isn't far outweighed by the bad. One can only hope that films like "Traffic" represent a shift in public opinion towards America's disastrous drug war. | |