Soderbergh effortlessly herds these characters and themes, using both the trenchant structure of Gaghan's script and a variety of filmmaking techniques -- changing the colors of the film between each of the stories is just one. If you don't know what's going on, like when local cops crash a DEA bust, it's because you're supposed to be as confused as the characters.

Moving from city to city, into cheap hotels, across the White House lawn, through country clubs and across the U.S.-Mexico border, "Traffic" feels like a documentary or a nightly newscast. (Soderbergh and Gaghan met with and interviewed the same policymakers and cops who appeared in the film as themselves or as characters; in addition, New York Times investigative reporter Tim Golden was a consultant.)

It's a thrilling movie because it feels so real. Most of the hand-held camerawork, shot by Soderbergh under an alias, provides a rushing sense of immediacy. You're there, inside the news, watching it happen to and because of real characters -- characters you care about, characters who are as complicated and flawed as the real thing.

But the entire point of "Traffic" is that it is bigger than its characters, and that's what makes the movie so important: It's a film that's moved beyond laying out the facts and letting its audience sort them out. Soderbergh and Gaghan have a clear opinion and neither are holding back -- they're not afraid to risk sounding didactic in service of what they consider a moral high ground.

Some critics have claimed that "Traffic" is flawed because it doesn't really offer any solutions. They're wrong. In the Douglas sequence -- the emotional center of the film -- Soderbergh suggests that the only way to deal with the drug problem is on a human-to-human level. The grand war is more preposterous than a quagmire like Vietnam. It's worse because here we fight our own families. If people do drugs, and they will, always, legal or not, some of them will become addicted to drugs. And if they become addicted, they need to get treatment, and they need attention and they need support.

In interviews promoting the film, Soderbergh says that neither he nor most of the people he spoke with think that drug legalization will happen anytime soon. He favors treating drugs as a health issue, not a criminal one. Soderbergh knows it's not a sexy subject, but he obviously thought enough of it to include it in an already sprawling story.

Sure, Soderbergh is far more interested in the problem, and the hypocrisy, of the drug war. Douglas repeatedly dips into his Scotch, and a half-dozen Congress members and politicians chatter away at a cocktail party. The film never says that alcohol and tobacco kill more than half a million people a year, while coke and heroin kill 3,000 and marijuana none -- it doesn't have to.

You could also fault Soderbergh for not really showing why regular people do drugs, or trying to show that drugs are pleasurable, life-changing, relaxing or fun. In this film, the only civilians we see do drugs are a few prep school teenagers. Of them, one has some sort of seizure and another becomes a whoring junkie. But at the same time, you could argue that Soderbergh knows that most of the people in his audience have used drugs: More than half of high school graduates have, there are an estimated 80 million users and the drug trade is worth more than $200 billion a year.

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