I knew Traffic was going to be a morality play—actually a series of morality plays (it’s based on the Brit TV series Traffik so it has all the macramé of interwoven plots of the weekly TV show—General Hospital plots unlimited as applied to Mexican drug cartels). Traffic is a sophisticated version of the Drug Ethics Question, which is to say it’s a morality play for people who feel they have evolved ideas about what to do about the DP. The trouble with any of this is that DRUGS ARE NOT A MORAL PROBLEM. A social problem, maybe, an educational problem, a problem connected with hypocrisy, politics, etc., but not a moral one. It’s the moral issue that caused the drug problem in the first place (but don’t get me started on that sanctimonious idiot Henry Anslinger).

And, because we’re so sophisticated, we can’t have any neat ending to the problem (hint, there is no end to this problem). Things were so much simpler in the old days with movies like The Poppy Is Also a Flower in which Trevor Howard almost single-handedly cleans up the international drug trade or the movie in which William Powell solves the poppy-growing problem in Egypt through rear projection. In Traffic we have to settle for techno revenge, rehab, and sports metaphors: the bug-planting in the Yuppie drug baron’s mansion, the en famille Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and Benicio Del Toro at the Baseball game at the end of the movie. Yeah, that’s the answer, Little League in Tijuana. By the way, why is the United States in brilliant Technicolor and Mexico in sepia? Or was this footage just processed in Mexico?

And it’s also a soap opera—but whaddya expect from the director of Erin Brockovich?—wherein the drug czar’s daughter becomes a crack whore (and then moves on to the harder stuff)? How likely is that? Although, what did he expect? Every other word out of Michael Douglas’s mouth is drugs. "Drugs was all Daddy talked about at home." The ending is way over the top—where Daddy finds his blissed-out daughter in a tenement whorehouse with the middle-age John gathering up his clothes. This is real overwrought La Boheme stuff, pulling out all the stops. And, hey, there’s something else wrong with this flick—the drug czar is the hero? There’s always been this weird thing with drug-cop nomenclature. Doesn’t "Drug Czar" sound like the head of the Medellin cartel? And Drug Enforcement Agency—what kind of sick government would enforce drugs on their own people to begin with?

In Which We Return to the Subject at Hand

Okay, listen up, drug czar, vice squad, DEA chumps! Get out your palm pilots, here’s my 12-step program for you. And if you don’t follow it, don’t blame me if the DP isn’t cleaned up any time soon: