Drug War’s Failures Play Out in The Trade: New at Reason

In all the billions of words and electronic images expended in telling the story of the war on drugs, perhaps nothing sums it up quite so concisely as a scene in Showtime’s new documentary series The Trade. As a bedraggled mother is dragged off following her arrest on heroin charges, a cop kneels to speak to her crying children. “It’s okay,” he comforts them. “We’re the good guys.” After more than a century of this senseless, futile war, you still can’t identify the players without a scorecard.

Producer-director Matthew Heineman, in his second go-round with the war on drugs (his 2015 film Cartel Land was nominated for the Oscar in documentaries), has given us an unnervingly close-up study of the conflict. Given an astonishing level of access to both Mexican drug lords and American junkies, he’s intercut their stories with a narrative about an Ohio police narcotics squad, which though far more ordinary, is still revealing. Television critic Glenn Garvin previews.

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