The War on Drugs


"If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don't know how you wage war on your own family." — Robert Wakefield, "Traffic"

It's been a decade and a half since "Traffic" took home Best Picture. It was a film about the war on drugs, and how it was a losing battle. In the 15 years since, we haven't become more optimistic about the future of the war or the past.

Consider the state of drug-war related films and TV shows in the past two years. I recently watched "Kill the Messenger," a good but overlooked film from last fall. In it, Jeremy Renner plays a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who uncovers the truth about the CIA and its role in bringing cocaine into Los Angeles and the United States.

It doesn't make you feel good about our government, or the fact that while some were fighting a war on drugs in the 1980s and early 1990s, other government agencies were helping make it happen to finance another war — the one on communism.

"Narcos," a fantastic new series on Netflix, focuses on those early 1980s years fighting the drug war in Columbia against Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. It gives another spin on the war on drugs and the violence of the cartels, both in Columbia and abroad. It's not a hopeful or optimistic picture of that period. Which is interesting, because that period is referenced in another film about the war on drugs, "Sicario."

"Sicario" got a wider release last week and draws its name from the Spanish term for hit man. As you might imagine, it's not a light-hearted film. Emily Blunt and Bencio del Toro — who was a star in "Traffic" — are great in the film. And it certainly paints the picture of violence in Mexico — something also done by the now-cancelled FX series, "The Bridge."

(Spoiler Alert) A big part of the plot in "Sicario" revolves around the CIA — those guys again — monkeying around in the drug trade. The rationale being that now there's so many cartels it's created bedlam, and they yearn for a simpler time, like when Escobar ran the drug trade. After watching 10 hours of that biopic series, it's hard to idealize that time.

Fifteen years ago "Traffic" painted a bleak picture of the war on drugs. In 2015, shows like "Narcos" and movies like "Sicario" aren't suggesting it's gotten any better.

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