Drug Wars Blues

"Drug Wars," Frontline, Public Broadcasting Service, October 9 and 10, 2000.

"Drug Wars," Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, October 3, 2000.

What kind of man would stand up to the Republican mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, and tell him flat out that he is wrong? Tell him, "No, Rudy, just busting addicts doesn't clean up the streets like you say. In fact, it does just the opposite. Busting 'em raises crime." I can think of one guy, a lifelong Republican who held a much higher office. Former U.S. President Richard Nixon will always be known for his cover-up of the Watergate Hotel break-in, but who would have thought that he would have taken such a radical stance on drugs? "A program of law enforcement alone is not enough," a composed President Nixon is seen saying in a two-hour Public Broadcasting System (PBS) Frontline series, "because as we succeed in the law enforcement side, we may increase crime, increase crime because of the inability of those who are unable to obtain drugs to feed their habit, and so this means on the treatment of addicts we go parallel with a program that is strong in this field," a program that uses methadone as a substitute for heroin. Why would our government ever substitute one drug for another? Because methadone works and Nixon knew it.

The PBS Frontline documentary Drug Wars was reported and produced by a team led by former CBS News 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman. The result is the most comprehensive treatment of U.S. counter-narcotics policy available on film. Drug Wars credits and builds upon the path-breaking work of the 1998 book, The Fix, by Michael Massing, which documented Nixon's unconventional drug policies. The PBS series was produced in coordination with National Public Radio (NPR) in a live panel moderated by Juan Williams at Georgetown University Law Center. The speakers included many of the same former U.S. drug control officials who appear in the Frontline series. Their collective discussion of the drug war includes many telling anecdotes and other surprises, especially about policies at home.

Yet anyone seeking to understand current U.S. counter-narcotics policies overseas will be disappointed by both productions. While they each answer the compelling question "How did we get to the point where we are now in the drug war?," they barely mention the $1.3 billion in military aid that the United States is now providing to Colombia. This latest package has led the Andean nation to surpass El Salvador as the site of the largest U.S.-backed counter-insurgency effort since the Vietnam War.

What the PBS documentary does do is present Colombian drug traffickers like two of the infamous Ochoa brothers on camera for the first time. They chronicle the rise of the cocaine trade from the late 1970s into the early 1990s and its spread to other nations, including the Bahamas and Mexico. Their exclusive interviews underscore a point that is also made in the film by none other than another former U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, when he said that trying to stop drugs from crossing borders is as futile as "carrying water in a sieve."

Both the PBS series and the NPR panel also present a number of former American drug war vetrans who have since changed their own views. William Alden was the second-in-command of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for seven years beginning in 1986, the year the college basketball star, Len Bias, died from a new cocaine-based drug called "crack." Although he once championed law enforcement efforts to control the problem, Alden now says, like Nixon did nearly three decades ago, that this approach does not work by itself. Jack Lawn was Alden's boss at the DEA under President Reagan, and he too told Frontline the same thing. The shifts in the U.S. policy pendulum between law enforcement and drug treatment is a...