The recent film Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) suggests many of the reasons why the war on drugs has seemed doomed to failure, based on the economics of the international drug trade today. The film tells several stories at one time, but at heart, all relate to the central issue of why drugs are grown in poor countries like Mexico and then smuggled into richer countries like the United States, why desperate people will enter the drug trade to make a living, and why huge cartels have come into being to oversee the drug trade.
The failure of the war on drugs has been much discussed, and even conservatives are beginning to express doubts. A recent article in The Washington Times asks,
For decades, we have been grinding away at the dope trade, spending hugely, putting appalling numbers of users and dealers in prison, increasing the powers of the federal police. What have we gotten for it? (Reed, 2000, p. C2).
The answer given is, not much: "Because of the drug laws, horrendous amounts of money go to drug lords in Colombia who otherwise couldn't make a living" (Reed, 2000, p. C2). This is also the answer given by the film Traffic.
In the film, the direction of the drug traffic is clear--it moves from the poorer countries of Latin America north to where the market is, in the United States. This traffic involves the heads of the cartels, those who work for them, distributors in the United States, and small-time pushers such as the black man who deals through a crack in his door. All of these people exist in the drug world for one reason--the user who buys the drug at the end of the line. The United States has laws against importing, selling, or using drugs, and much of the drug effort has been directed toward interdiction, toward stopping the drugs from entering the United States.
Pressures have also been brought to bear on the countries of Latin America for not doing more to stop the cultivation and productio...