Roulakis - Traffic

The Wakefield family is a wealthy family that lives in Ohio. This family includes a prominent father figure who is not only a judge, but now the head of the President's Office of National Drug Control. Though this movie is about drug trafficking, it shows how and why drugs are a part of each character's life. Robert Wakefield's daughter, Caroline, is sixteen years old, at the top of her class, and an honor student. Throughout the film we slowly see how her experimentation with drugs turns into an addiction and eventually leads her on a path that could destroy her life. Her addiction, and her father's persistence to stop the drug cartel's in Mexico end up impacting each other's lives more than they could imagine.

Robert Wakefield believes that he can win the war on drugs on both a political and social level. He speaks to the public, travels around the country and even to Mexico to meet with important political figures that could help him "win" this war. However, he never looks at his own home and how what he really needs to do is look at how drugs are effecting him and his family on an individual level. In the end, he realizes that it is the only way that he can win the war that's almost impossible to stop. He was so busy trying to stop all these powerful and corrupt people, that he and his wife did not even realize how bad their daughter's addiction to cocaine was getting. Eventually, at the end of the movie when Wakefield is giving a speech for the press at the White House, he realizes that a war on drugs was actually in his own home, and that he couldn't contribute anything to his country before helping his own family. During Caroline's second time in rehab, the audience can actually tell that she is willing to get better and is happy that she is getting help. After she gives a touching speech the camera falls onto her father who is asked to respond to her speech and he says, "My name is Robert. And my wife, Barbara and I are here to support our daughter Caroline. And we're here to listen." This is when I believe the Wakefield family has won the war on drugs - on an individual level.