Traffik is a 1989 Channel Four television miniseries, covering numerous angles of the international trade in opium and heroin. It spawned a 2000 US film and a 2004 US TV series.
An early example of a Hypertext Story screenplay, it features three main plotlines:
- UK Minister Jack Lithgow (Bill Paterson) is a rising political star and overseas representative of the Prime Minister, poised to ink a treaty with Pakistan on drug control. A driven man at work, he neglects his family at home, causing his wife to leave him and his daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) to become a drug addict. He wrestles with his conscience and the political expectations of a hard line on society's drug problems, as his own household disintegrates under its own.
- West German businessman Karl Rosshalde appears to be a model citizen, running hydropower engineering projects in rural Pakistan. However, his immense personal wealth derives entirely from his involvement in drug trading, and a police investigation leads to his arrest. With a trial underway and their black market empire teetering, his wife Helen (Lindsay Duncan) faces the choice between losing it all, or taking his dark dealings into her own hands. Two German policemen, Ulli and Dieter, spar with the Rosshaldes in a cat-and-mouse game, with both sides pushing how far they will go to win.
- Pakistani farmer Fazal (Jamal Shah) grows opium as per local practice. A political-theater government raid on his crops leaves him jobless with a gunshot wound in his hand. After making his way to the port city of Karachi, he happens into the good graces of local drug magnate Tariq Butt (Talat Hussein) and begins to take on increasingly dubious work assignments for him - obligations that take a harsh toll on him and his family.
This show provides examples of:
- Black-and-Gray Morality: Some of the clear victims are also driven to do terrible things, in part due to circumstances beyond their control. Other evildoers are not victims in any real sense, though.
- Crapsack World: Exploitation exists across all strata of society, causing rich and poor alike to participate in the drug trade in their own self-interest. Also identified as a major cause of the demand for drugs by Minister Lithgow at the end.
- Drugs Are Bad: To be expected, though with nuance and context. All three plotlines show the tremendous damage that addiction or the drug trade can inflict on real people, but also show how a flawed society shoulders some of the blame for driving people to seek an escape.
- Hyperlink Story: At least three plots take place: in the UK, West Germany, and Pakistan. An early example of this trope, given that the TV series was released in 1989, before the Internet and hyperlinked webpages became a household phenomenon.
Episodes of this series provide examples of:
- Addiction Displacement: Caroline is slowly coming off of heroin and smokes tobacco cigarettes constantly at her AA meeting. Understandable, given the tradeoff.
- Batman Gambit: Several, during the course of Rosshalde's deal with Tariq.
- Helen agrees to smuggle heroin from Karachi to Hamburg to prove to Tariq that she won't be searched - an impossibility, given the criminal case against her husband. She throws away the drugs at Karachi airport, undergoes a predictably thorough and intrusive search at Hamburg, and then buys back some existing Tariq brand heroin on the Hamburg market to send back to Tariq.
- Helen knows the police are tapping her phone. To throw them off the scent she calls Tariq from the tapped phone and chats with him regarding a shipment of Indian statues. The police detain her shipment and one overzealous officer smashes all the statues, finding nothing and discrediting the investigation as the TV news channels arrive to cover the story.
- The Customs inspectors industrial action (workers' strike) has been in the news as a background report for a while. Tariq Butt sends over the actual heroin shipment in the stomachs of several Pakistani airline passengers working as mules during the first night of the strike, when no customs officers are able to stop them.
- Bittersweet Ending: All three storylines end with the possibility of improvement and justice, at the cost of all the human suffering that has gone before.
- In the UK, Lithgow's heroin addict daughter Caroline is in rehab, going on four days clean, and former Minister Lithgow himself appears to accept that you can't dictate a drug-free life by fiat, speaking at a global forum on the need for making a society worth living in.
- In Germany, Ulli is making inroads to building a case against the drug lord, with the apparent backing of the German police and may bring justice after losing his investigator partner Dieter and after a failed court process.
- In Pakistan, Fazal is safely reunited with his children after losing his wife to drug poisoning and avenging himself on the Pakistani drug lord.
- Book Ends: The series begins and ends with a panoramic aerial shot of hilly rural Pakistan, heartland of the opium crops.
- Call-Back: Lithgow, on his first trip to Pakistan, meets Fazal briefly as the farmer tries to press a letter into his hands. Lithgow's last trip to Pakistan shows him visiting a prison in Karachi where Fazal is being beaten for his involvement in the drug trade, long after the ineffective government policies and harsh punishments have forced him off his land.
- Churchgoing Villain: Tariq Butt, the drug lord, is seen visiting the mosque for prayers. He is also furious with his son for attending western-style parties where alcohol is consumed (contravening Muslim teachings).
- Culture Clash: Roomami points out the cultural comparison to Lithgow: in the lawless frontiers of Pakistan, people have smoked opium cigarettes for centuries and only the foolish youths take it beyond control, but alcohol is strictly forbidden. In the UK, alcohol abuse is far more problematic than heroin abuse, but is legal. Roomami's cousin, a tribal leader, reinforces this point through his actions: he offers Lithgow an opium cigarette as a sign of friendship, much as a British man might offer a colleague a drink.
- Lithgow even admits this as he finally accepts the opium cigarette: "I've thrown everything else I believe in out the window."
- Delayed Reaction: When Fazal asks Tariq Butt for a proper job, Butt retorts with "what use have I for a cripple?" referring to Fazal's injured hand. Butt further tests Fazal's mettle by giving him a sadistically tight handshake. Fazal remains impassive throughout, then takes his leave, only succumbing to his intense pain in the corridor outside.
- Descent into Addiction: Lithgow's daughter, Caroline, starts off as a promising university student in the UK. As the series progresses, she's shown becoming addicted to heroin. She steals and sells her parents' home belongings, hides drug paraphernalia inside hollowed-out books at home, breaks into drugstores, and is ultimately seen shooting up in public toilets and selling her body to strangers. In her final scene, she recounts her downward spiral to an addicts support group - some of which was not shown onscreen but underlies the insidious gradual nature of addiction and the victim's self-deceptions.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
- Played straight in the Pakistan and Germany plotlines. Tariq Butt dotes on his son, admitting that he cannot remain angry at him (despite his violation of Islamic teachings by drinking alcohol). Karl Rosshalde has a loving wife who is devoted to their two children (so devoted, she ascends from trophy wife to drug lord to keep the family safe).
- Subtly subverted in the UK plotline. When (recently-fired) Minister Lithgow is roaming London looking for his addict daughter, he meets up with her drug dealer - a man clearly on the way down. (The neighbors are willing to commit arson to force him to leave, and he's about to run out of injectable veins.) Lithgow gets a lead on his missing daughter and is about to leave, when the dealer wishes him luck, and comments - in a moment of strange sympathy - that he wished he had somebody looking for him.
- Fan Disservice: As Karl Rosshalde's trial wears on, his lawyer Domenquez begins a physical relationship with Karl's wife, Helen. She's not exactly enthusiastic about this, but may consider it a price of doing business with him. There are scenes with both Domenquez and Helen unclothed, that do not rate as particularly alluring.
- Helen's harrowing strip-search by the female German customs officer is definitely not played for titillation. The (implied) intrusive cavity search afterward just takes it even further into Squick territory.
- From Bad to Worse: Fazal and his family. As poor farmers from northwest Pakistan, they suffer throughout the entire series - first forced to grow poppies through economic pressures, then displaced from their bulldozed farmsteads in a superficial show of government crackdown, and then brought to Karachi as paupers hoping for a better life. Fazal's employment with a ruthless druglord makes things better, but not by much - and not for long.
- Hope Spot: Although true justice is still a long way off, by the end of the last episode all three locations (UK, Germany, Pakistan) see some progress being made towards addressing the drug problem. Most of Karl Rosshalde's criminal court proceedings are this, with the repeated expectation that he will be convicted.
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: While in prison, Fazal meets a hopeless addict, who is so far gone he can't remember what day it is and doesn't even care what day he will be hanged - he only worries about running out of heroin before they execute him. Fazal, himself a farmer-turned-hatchet-man for a drug lord, asks the wretched addict what he used to be in life. The answer: a doctor.
- Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Helen becomes this to Karl Rosshalde. By the end of the series, while he's in jail, she's proven herself capable of shaking down debtors, facing off creditors, ordering hits on a state's witness, securing the release of her young son from hostage takers, persuading a Pakistani drug lord to take her seriously with an in-person crack meeting, and outwitting the German drug interception team several times. By the end of the show, he just wants to make love and take the kids for a vacation - she's ready to plot their next big drug deal.
- In Medias Res: The entire series starts off halfway through a drug deal at an industrial compound.
- Karma Houdini: Not every injustice is righted by the end, although there are ambiguous signs that the villains may someday get their comeuppance. Helen and Karl Rosshalde are at liberty and may even be planning the next big drug haul, though this time the police are listening in.
- Mama Bear: Helen Rosshalde is this to her children. Introduced as a trophy wife, she uncovers her true depths of resilience and determination when her children are threatened.
- Missing Child: Helen Rosshalde gets a (brief) sequence of audience sympathy, when her black-market drug contacts turn nasty and kidnap her son in broad daylight, with dire threats if she doesn't repay them.
- Slightly nuanced in Minister Lithgow's story in the UK, who's forced to deal with the fear of losing his grown adult daughter to addiction. Also, dealing with her destructive behavior to the point that she will lie, cheat, and steal from her parents to finance her habit. When Lithgow ultimately finds her passed out in a filthy bedsit, selling her body for drug money, it's actually a comparatively positive ending for a runaway drug addict.
- Oh, Crap!: Many moments throughout the series when you can almost see a character's realization of horror overcome them.
- Ulli gets several as his police force comes under attack during the drug investigations. After he shoots and kills a gunman to protect the state's witness, he recognizes the man's face and quickly realizes the assassin has bomb-trapped Ulli's car. He's too late to save his partner, Dieter, who's gone to fetch the car. Later, Ulli has another "moments too late" realization when the state's witness receives two breakfasts delivered consecutively to his room instead of one. The first one was poisoned, killing the witness before help could arrive.
- Fazal's release from jail should be a happy day. Instead, he finds that his family has been evicted from their lodgings, his wife and children have been sent to the UK as mules for the drug lord, and his wife is dead of drug poisoning because the condoms she swallowed broke apart.
- Even Tariq Butt gets this, at the very end, though there's an admirable recovery an attempt at false bravado. It doesn't help him though: Fazal still injects him with a lethal dose of heroin to the neck.
- Pretty in Mink: Helen Rosshalde is frequently seen wearing a fur-lined coat, underlining her status as a lady of leisure, married to a wealthy man. It provides a jarring contrast to the increasingly dirty deeds she must do to keep her family's drug empire afloat.
- Stepford Smiler: Subverted. Helen Rosshalde becomes the main character in the Germany plot, and refuses to continue with the role of decorative wife as her husband's drug empire starts to crumble.
- Stomach of Holding: The mode of transport finally used to get Tariq Butt's heroin into London: each mule has swallowed dozens of condoms stuffed with heroin. Subverted in that Fazal's wife struggles to swallow them at first, and then some leak or break in her stomach, killing her and leaving her children orphaned in a foreign land.
- Would Hurt a Child: In the poppy-growing subplot in Pakistan, the threat of harm extends to one's family and children as part of the drug trade. Tariq Butt himself explicitly uses this as a means of controlling his farmers and chemists, at one point sparing a chemist's life but executing his young son in front of him.
