Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 21, 1990 TAG: 9004210485
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN J. O'CONNOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At a recent news conference he was forced to admit that his much-publicized war on drugs in the streets of Washington, D.C., did not, after a full year, greatly affect drug pushing or staggering crime statistics.
Then the new presidential front-runner in Peru, Alberto Fujimoro, publicly dismissed the United States government's drug war as "completely inefficient" in its efforts to end coca farming in his country.
That's the bad news from the cocaine front. Now, exploring the international heroin trade, public television's Masterpiece Theater presentation over the next several weeks will hardly prove comforting to Bennett.
Getting underway Sunday evening (at 9 p.m. on Channel 15 in the Roanoke viewing area) with a special two-hour episode, "Traffik" is a five-part Picture Partnership Production made for England's Channel 4.
Brian Eastman, the producer, and Simon Moore, the writer, have taken pains to avoid the standard television-entertainment treatment of illegal drugs, the kind in which the good guys chase the bad guys and everything is neatly resolved in a virtue-triumphant scenario.
"Traffik" focuses on heroin as an enormously profitable business, its various markets spanning major cities and continents.
The making, marketing and using of heroin is traced from the fields of rural Pakistan to distribution points in Germany to the grubby streets and privileged sanctuaries of Britain.
The point, articulated in the end by a British politician who once thought otherwise: "We cannot police the world. We cannot stop (heroin) supplies. We can only limit the demand for it by producing a decent society that people want to live in, not escape from."
Of course, this perception gets the politician fired from his ministerial post. His party does not want to hear about anything that might suggest bigger public expenditures.
The structure of this miniseries is unusually ambitious and complex. The scene shifts constantly, often with subtitles, between three strategic points, each with its separate set of characters.
In Pakistan, there is the young farmer Fazal (Jamal Shah), who needs the income from his poppy fields to support his wife and two young sons. The government, with financial aid from Britain, is trying to get such farmers to switch to other crops, but they would have to grow 20 acres of sugar cane to equal the revenue from 5 acres of poppy. The frustrated Fazal ends up moving south to Karachi, where he begins working for the evil heroin dealer Tariq Butt (Talat Hussain).
Meanwhile, in Hamburg, West Germany, a wealthy businessman named Karl Rosshalde (George Kukura) has been arrested on charges of smuggling 70 kilos - roughly 150 pounds - of heroin from Pakistan. A ship's captain was caught in the bungled deal and has agreed to serve as a trial prosecution witness.
Meanwhile, Karl's wife Helen (Lindsay Duncan), British and a former Olympics swimmer, is not very happy at the prospect of leaving a life of luxury.
Then in London there is the British Home Office minister, a self-made Scotsman named Jack Lithgow. As minister overseeing the government's drug policies, Jack makes frequent trips to Pakistan, meeting with various officials who assure him that further British aid will help stem the heroin flow. About 80 percent of the heroin reaching Britain comes from Pakistan.
Despite the steady, and accelerating, jumps from one authentic location to another, there is little or no confusion about what is happening where. Moore spent more than a year of research on his subject before writing a script, and the effort pays off in the documentary-like style of the film.
The process through which a beautiful field poppy becomes a substance being injected into an addict's arm is followed closely and in almost clinical detail, right down to a scene in which actual heroin is made from actual opium.
The facts are kept starkly simple.
Poppies, for instance, are incredibly easy to grow, requiring a minimum of water and nutrients. Heroin can be produced in bulk with relatively primitive and inexpensive equipment. Doctors don't like to treat addicts, because they are messy and disruptive. If heroin were completely eliminated in Pakistan, Africa could easily be ready to replace the supply in a few years.
And, as someone notes, it's probable that right now someone in a California laboratory is creating a drug a thousand times as powerful as heroin and, no bigger than the head of a pin, effectively undectable.
Is stopping the demand for drugs the most feasible solution?
Is it even possible? There are no comforting answers in this important mini-series.
Only one point is hammered home: drugs are the major crisis of the last part of the 20th century.
by CNB