Yesterday the Feds unveiled their plan to break out the gamma ray scanners on the Mexican border for the war on drugs, and Clinton announced a firm, if modest, hike in cigarette taxes.
Addiction is also a family matter, something the recovery movement has seized upon.
This notion has both empowered individual struggle and helped furnish the couch for our national confessional. Spliced beside a former truckstop prostitute who used her daughter as a lookout while she fixed in the car, we are supposed to get the sense that addiction is the great leveler, but even the most strung-out dynastic scion must admit that membership has its privileges. That alcohol and cigarettes kill far more people than anything a Pentagon warhead scanner trained on a pick-up truck in Tijuana might detect is evident enough from all the lingering shots of bloated livers and gaping tracheas. The fact is driven home in the testimony of a rasping, nearly lungless woman, a former model ordered to start smoking by her Madison Avenue handlers. Every dramatic moment is utterly predictable, from first rail of coke to last relapse to class valedictory, though it might say more about the ubiquity of our era's Horatio Alger tale than the admittedly plodding teleplay.