‘Traffik’ a Needle-Sharp Thriller About the Heroin Trade

Here is an incredibly good program about the planet that says nothing about the greenhouse effect, global warming or the destruction of rain forests. No talk of ecosystems here, and the only reference to “green” concerns money.

However, if it’s true that life is fragile and that all the living organisms of our environment are mutually dependent and interwoven, then this five-part British miniseries making its PBS debut Sunday on “Masterpiece Theatre” is indeed stunningly on target for Earth Day.

“Traffik” (8 p.m. on Channels 50 and 24; 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15) is about the heroin trade, its few beneficiaries and its infinite victims.

What you have here are six hours of tingles (the premiere is two hours) in an international thriller stretching from the poppy fields and teeming slums of Pakistan to the corrupt rich of Hamburg to the power elite and the filthy, needle-infested haunts of drug addicts in London.

Although the locales are different, the message is directly applicable to the horrendous drug problem in the United States and its tentacles abroad.

Initially, there’s difficulty unraveling the complex weave of characters populating this unusual, absolutely gripping drama by Simon Moore. However, soon it’s evident that his overall scenario encloses three interconnected stories in separate locations.

In Pakistan, the pauper Fazal (Jamal Shah) ekes out a meager living for his wife and two small children by working in the vast fields of opium-yielding poppies that are transformed into the illegal heroin that brings fabulous wealth and an aura of legitimacy to German drug smuggler Karl Rosshalde (George Kukura) and his British wife, Helen (Lindsay Duncan), in Hamburg. Meanwhile, British cabinet minister Jack Lithgow (Bill Paterson) goes to Pakistan to explore giving that nation financial aid in exchange for destroying the poppies that are the livelihood of innocent farmers like Fazal, but which ultimately become the heroin that ruins lives in England and elsewhere.

This global intersecting of lives is intensified when Rosshalde is arrested in Hamburg for drug trafficking (“traffik” is German for traffic), Lithgow discovers that his Cambridge-student daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) is addicted to heroin and a desperate Fazal gets a job with a powerful drug kingpin (Talat Hussain) in Karachi. In spite of his new line of work, which he has undertaken simply to feed his family, you feel the deep humanity of Fazal.

Director Alastair Reid has superbly mounted “Traffik” in all three countries, but it’s his scenes of Pakistani poverty--set against the physical beauty of the poppy fields and glittery opulence of the drug smugglers--that are most powerful.

There are fine performances here from top to bottom. Yet the great dramatic strength of “Traffik” comes from the way its protagonists are at once closely bound and, for the most part, distanced from each other, and from its depiction of the poppy as life-giving to the humble Pakistani farmer and, further down the line, deadly to the heroin user.

“Nothing that grows from the ground is evil,” Lithgow hears from a Pakistani who rationalizes the poppy fields. “There are only evil men.” In essence, that is the same self-serving “guns-don’t-kill, people-kill” argument put forth by the gun lobby in the United States. In a way, though, it also relates to the complaint by cocoa growers in Colombia, that the cocaine trade is not being fueled by them, but by the U.S. cocaine habit.

Through Lithgow’s daughter, Caroline, “Traffik” touches the soul of addiction, depicting with savage clarity the depths to which the addict sinks to support a habit. These ugly sequences are sometimes explosive, other times enigmatic. At one point Caroline visits her dying grandfather in the hospital and, after he falls asleep, kisses him. Then she steals his money.

There are other moments of deep irony:

* The same brutal Pakistani drug lord who boasts of turning “poppy into gold” chastises his son for disobeying the laws of Islam by drinking alcohol.

* As his young son watches, an Afghanistan man involved in the drug trade converts poppies to heroin. Then his entire family takes part in packaging the drug for transport to Pakistan.

* Helen Rosshalde shows a sweetly tender side with her young son, then continues her quest to keep the family heroin business afloat and maintain her rich lifestyle while her husband awaits trial and two German narcs shadow her.

It is Helen Rosshalde, in fact, who turns out to be the most fascinatingly evil and complex character in the story, as she later icily plots the murder of a witness against her husband: “There’s always a way. If people can shoot the Pope and the President, you can get to anybody.”

There are some foggy areas in “Traffik,” especially relating to inexplicable police security lapses in the fifth episode, and the ending disappoints in the way it unrealistically ties everything together in a big fat knot. Overall, though, “Traffik” is terrific work.

This is not only a drama that is continuously challenging and suspenseful, but also one packing as much meat as style--the kind of epic, sometimes politically pointed miniseries that the British deliver with a regularity that leaves nearly all U.S. miniseries makers in the dust.

As a bonus, moreover, this is no tabloid docudrama drawn from screaming headlines or sensational crime stories whose facts are gratuitously shaped and reshaped for TV according to dramatic whim. This is fiction rooted in today’s ugly reality. “Traffik” is its own screaming headline.