Pubdate: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company Contact: 229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036 Fax: (212) 556-3622 Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: James Barron Media Talk: 'Nightline' to Devote a Full Week to Drugs Ted Koppel is the first to say that "Nightline" this week will be journalism imitating art: five nights about drug trafficking inspired by the Steven Soderbergh film "Traffic." That will be 150 minutes of "Nightline," three minutes more than the entire film. But that includes the commercials. "It's not the movie that got me to do five nights, it's the subject," Mr. Koppel said last week. Mr. Koppel sounded as if he had questions about the consequences of laws mandating tough sentences for drug offenders. "We've got more than two million people in prison in this country, more on a per capita basis than in any other country in the world, and the majority are in for drug-related crimes," he said. Moviegoers who watch "Nightline" on ABC may have a sense of the past revisited as Mr. Koppel covers much of the same ground that "Traffic" did. "One of the first questions I wanted to raise with people, customs officials or D.E.A. people, is, `Have you seen the movie, and how does it compare to reality?' " Mr. Koppel said. "They all had the same reaction: this movie gets it right, and what it gets right above everything else is the interconnection between and among the growers, the traffickers and the consumers. It never lets you believe if we could just get rid of the growers, the problem would be over, or if we could just get rid of the traffickers, the problem would be over. This is a demand-generated problem." - --- MAP posted-by: Kirk Bauer