NEW YORK — After three decades, the war on drugs is largely a bust. That's one finding of Drug Wars, an epic exploration into the United States government's battle to stem the flow of illegal drugs.

        Examinations of the drug problem are usually framed from the perspective of the users or the cops who bust them on the street.

        But the four-hour Frontline report, which PBS airs tonight and Tuesday at 9 p.m. EDT, lets viewers hear from high-level government officials and traffickers, drug agents and drug lords, including men who once headed Colombia's notorious Medellin cartel, which the film identifies as the world's largest-ever criminal syndicate.

        More than a year in the making, Drug Wars takes an inside look at the drug business, including footage of the ambush of an entire division of Mexico's federal drug police by a unit of the Mexican army protecting a drug operation.

        The story begins in the first days of Richard Nixon's presidency.

        “You can imagine the challenge trying to lay out for an audience the last 30 years,” says reporter and co-producer Lowell Bergman, adding, “I think people will be surprised that Nixon turns out to be the most effective in terms of getting control of a particular drug, in this case heroin.”

        In 1970, a controversial program of dispensing to addicts the new synthetic opiate, methadone, was launched by a White House concerned that, outside its door, the nation's capital had become the nation's crime capital. A year after methadone clinics opened around Washington, burglaries had dropped by 41 percent.

        The message seemed clear. With treatment, addicts could be helped to overcome their habit. And while they were helped, they no longer had to steal to support that habit — nor were they supporting illegal drug trade.

        Even so, Mr. Nixon wasn't ready to launch a national methadone treatment program. Then, a year later, he was shocked to learn of raging heroin use by American troops in Vietnam. This put a far more sympathetic face on the junkie.

        With that, the law-and-order president unveiled a drug program that addressed drug abuse as a sickness, not a crime. And as the sonorous Frontline narrator declares, “For the first and only time in the history of U.S. drug policy, treatment supplanted law enforcement for most of the attention and most of the money.”

        While Mr. Bergman insists that Drug Wars draws no particular conclusions, he says he and his collaborators were struck by an unexpected argument echoed by virtually every drug enforcement official they talked to: The better strategy is trying to reduce demand rather than shut off supply and punish consumers. Mr. Nixon, it seems, had started on the right track.

        In the film, former Drug Enforcement Administration head Jack Lawn calls for a new, centralized anti-drug force that devotes a full 90 percent of its budget to education, treatment and prevention.

        “Would that work? We won't know unless we try it,” Mr. Lawn says. “But 20 years of doing it the other way certainly has not worked.”

        In reporting Drug Wars, Mr. Bergman stays safely out of camera range (as usual, Frontline has no use for an on-camera personality). But not long ago, his anonymity was shattered.

        He, of course, is the former CBS News producer whose struggle to get a report about a tobacco industry whistle-blower on 60 Minutes became the subject of an Oscar-nominated film, The Insider. Al Pacino played Mr. Bergman in the 1999 drama.

        Now a free-lance investigative reporter, Mr. Bergman is speaking from Frontline headquarters in Boston as he puts the final touches on his film and rushes to finish the accompanying, information-rich Web site.

        “This is an issue that becomes very polarized very quickly,” he says of drug policy. “One person says decriminalize them all. Another person says shoot them all.”

        But what happened to derail Mr. Nixon's treatment-oriented strategy? As the 1972 election approached, the White House reverted to a more voter-friendly approach: Get tough on drugs and anyone who does them.

        With few departures, that has summed up the nation's drug policy ever since.

        “No one wants to be seen as soft on crime,” Mr. Bergman explains.

        The film compiles some of the consequences. The United States fights the drug war with a bureaucracy that, next year, will total 51 government agencies spending some $20 billion in federal money.

        The U.S. prison population has doubled since 1994 to nearly 2 million inmates — half of whom are jailed on drug-related charges. Meanwhile, the global narcotics business is worth an estimated $400 billion, and rapidly expanding.

        “Have we really looked this situation straight in the face,” Mr. Bergman muses, “where we can figure out what to do?”

        That is what he hopes Drug Wars will arm us for.

        Drug Wars Web site launches today at 9 p.m. EDT:

        www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs

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