The Screenwriter for 'Traffic' Says He Drew on His Past of Drug
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The Screenwriter for ‘Traffic’ Says He Drew on His Past of Drug Use by RICK LYMAN The New York Times Feb. 4, 2001 There was the Christmas morning in 1996 that he spent, pretty much at the end of his rope, awkwardly trying to steal crack cocaine from a curbside dealer who pulled a gun on him. But that was not enough to get him out of the junkie’s life. Nor was the time a dealer working out of an abandoned elevator shaft on the Lower East Side of Manhattan put a knife to his throat. Not even when a 300-pound fellow inmate strung out on PCP chased him around a Manhattan holding pen singing the theme from “I Love Lucy.” Not until a strange, dark kind of miracle occurred in July 1997, said Stephen Gaghan, did he finally hit the wall and realize that he had to change his life or die. “Over one long, five-day weekend, I had three separate heroin dealers get arrested,” Mr. Gaghan said. “My dealer, my backup dealer and my backup-backup dealer. I was left alone, and I just hit that place, that total incomprehensible demoralization. That was the end of it; up five days straight, locked in the bathroom, convinced there was nowhere else to go, I had to kill myself, I’m going to kill myself. I just couldn’t take another minute of it.” You might have spotted Mr. Gaghan during the Golden Globe Awards broadcast a couple of weeks ago, seated at the table right behind Tom Hanks, grinning happily, never more so then when he won the award for best screenplay for Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” an ensemble drama set in the world of drug smugglers, drug dealers and drug takers. Mr. Gaghan is 35, thin, with a rough- edged look, a wide smile (only recently acquired) and a loquacious nature. Mr. Gaghan, who said he won his Emmy in 1997 (as one of the writers for an episode of “N.Y.P.D. Blue”) while in the thick of heroin and cocaine addiction, and who is now considered likely to get an Oscar nomination for “Traffic,” said he had been cleaned up -1- for three and a half years. But now, he said, it is time to come clean about his past. “There was one person I knew who had stopped doing drugs, and his life seemed to be getting so much better,” Mr. Gaghan said. “So at the end of that five-day weekend I just picked up the phone and called him. And he helped me.” Mr. Gaghan has made references in interviews (and in his Golden Globes acceptance speech) to friends and acquaintances he made in the drug world. But until now he has kept quiet about his own two- decade odyssey with drugs, a long slow spiral that he said started at a fancy private school in Louisville, Ky., and included several arrests, squandered opportunities and accelerating bleakness until he found help to make his way back. “People were asking me about where the movie came from, where I got the characters and situations for `Traffic,’ and I found myself starting to speak in code,” he said. He would talk about research he had done in the drug culture, about unnamed acquaintances, but he never admitted the core truth: that a lot of it came from his own life. “Part of the recovery process is a commitment to truth, and I began to feel that I was not being truthful,” he said. “The stigma and shame of drug addiction is part of what makes it difficult for people to raise their hand and ask for help, and I felt that by not being completely honest I was, in a way, perpetuating that stigma.” Also, he said, so many people came up to him, especially after the Golden Globes, to say the movie had given them some hope. “If there is a message to the movie, I guess it’s that drugs should be considered a health care issue rather than a criminal issue,” Mr. Gaghan said. “And so many people came up to me recently, people who had gone through the wringer, just the wringer, half-dead people who came back to life, that I thought maybe saying a little bit about my own experience, and the parts of `Traffic’ that were borne out of my own experience, might be interesting to people.” Edward Zwick, the film director and television producer, said that he first met Mr. Gaghan four or five years ago, when the young writer was on the steepest slope of his descent, and that he could -2- tell Mr. Gaghan was “in a slippery place.” But he said he didn’t know quite how slippery or quite how steep until, while working with him on the “Traffic” script (Mr. Zwick is one of the film’s producers), it gradually became clear that actual experiences were being drawn upon. “You know, you sort of intuit things before you actually know them,” Mr. Zwick said. “I’ve known a lot of other people in recovery, so it’s not as if it’s mysterious to me. My father was an alcoholic, and I went through that with him. I’ve been out here longer than Stephen, and I’ve watched several people not make it. I doubt he’s smug about it, but the real triumph of Steve’s life has nothing to do with his screenplay or its reception. It has to do with putting his life back together.” It started, Mr. Gaghan said, as it often does for young people, with alcohol and marijuana. “I remember, when I was writing `Traffic,’ talking to top federal drug- enforcement officials and having them say they read it and found it very good and believable, except the scene where the girl describes her resume,” Mr. Gaghan said. It is the scene in which a prep-school student arrested for drug possession, ticks off her academic and athletic achievements to a disbelieving social worker. “They said to me, there is no way this girl could be achieving at the level you have her achieving at and be using cocaine,” Mr. Gaghan said. “I didn’t say to them--maybe I should have--that the resume I had the girl reciting was my resume exactly, at a time when I was drinking, every day, and smoking marijuana and taking cocaine. The only thing I changed is that, in reality, I had also been on the all-state soccer team in Kentucky. I just had her on the school volleyball team.” The point, he said, is that drug addiction can attack anyone, even a high-achieving private-school student from a solid, middle-class family in Kentucky. “It starts out, you’re running around with all your friends, you know. If you said to me, you’re going to end up lockedin your bathroom thinking that police were spying from helicopters through the skylight, I’d have said, no way. I’m going to an Ivy League college, and I’m taking over the world.” -3- Mr. Gaghan said many of his school friends also experimented with drugs, but for most of them it was a short-term affair. They tried it, didn’t like it or got scared and backed off. But for him, it became endlessly fascinating. “It was always just a point of trying to take it a little bit further than everybody else,” he said. “You always end up finding lower and lower companions. People fall out, and you end up with people who are just right on the edge of criminals, people who can procure for you the various things you need.” He was thrown out of school on the last day of his senior year, eventually got his equivalency diploma and went to a small business college in Massachusetts. There he hooked up with some Boston venture capitalists and started a catalog company, Fallen Empire Inc., hoping to make enough money to support his writing career and provide enough money for booze and drugs. One of his stories, “The Year With No Winter,” was published in the Iowa Review in 1990. But the business was a disaster. And when he had lost everyone’s money, he said, he simply ran away to New York: “I’d get in trouble in one place, so I’d just flee to someplace else.” And the whole time, he was using drugs: sometimes more regularly than at other times, two or three times kicking the habit for a short while. His shift was steadily toward cocaine and eventually the sniffable heroin that became popular among young people in the early 90’s. “Everybody was doing it,” he said. “It was just the thing to do. You’d walk around the East Village in your hipster boots, listening to grunge music and being the prototypes of heroin chic. I don’t know, it’s so embarrassing.” Though he didn’t know it, Mr. Gaghan said, he was by this time a full-blown drug addict. “I thought I was just having this literary adventure, that I was really fine,” he said. The dependence was getting worse. There were seizures, bouts of incontinence, a long, slow steady descent into mental and physical squalor. The amazing thing, he said, is that outside of his drug -4- friends he was able to keep it a secret from others in his life. “I worked very hard on the mask,” he said. “The one thing that I couldn’t disguise was that I was getting arrested all the time.” There were some 20 or 30 arrests, he estimated, all over the country, mostly for misdemeanor charges.