I first saw Stephen Gaghan being interviewed in February soon after the Academy Award nominations had been announced; Gaghan had received a nod for the Best Adapted Screenplay category for his work on the Steven Soderbergh anti-drug parable, Traffic (starring Benecio Del Toro, pictured below).

Gaghan was a personable fellow; easy going and laid back, He was slightly unkempt and disheveled (as Oscar nominated writers can sometimes be). Despite having been in the entertainment industry for the better part of ten years, Gaghan’s name has only recently surfaced in the mainstream media. Sure, Gaghan can list writing individual episodes of NYPD Blue and The Practice on his resume, but it wasn’t until director William Friedkin decided to take on his Rules of Engagement script that any of Gaghan’s feature screenplays had been produced. With his follow-up scripting efforts on Traffic and his Oscar victory, Gaghan shot to the top of the list of Hollywood screenwriters, despite only having written two screenplays, one of which received scant critical acclaim.

When Traffic opened theatrically in late December, Gaghan explained that he had been approached by director Edward Zwick to write a script focusing on the drug trade and that his research had consisted of visiting Mexico and interviewing people in Washington DC (Zwick eventually gave the rights to Gaghan and the story material to Soderbergh in return for a producer credit on Traffic). It seemed like a rather wholesome American success story: after years of diligent work, Gaghan finally triumphed.

Except the story didn’t end there.

After scores of other interviews and articles about Traffic, Gaghan’s story began to change. Finally, Gaghan came clean (no pun intended): He himself was an ex-junkie. Crack, heroin, pot... pretty much, you name it, he’d done it.

Rumor had it that actor Topher Grace’s character in Traffic (the prep student who gets his girlfriend involved with heroin) is based on Gaghan himself. Gaghan was even quoted in the New York Times talking about his drug experience while working at the studios. Said Gaghan, "I smoked crack in my office on the Universal lot, always with some heroin to even it out. I smoked crack in my office on the Fox lot [too]."

And for this admission, Hollywood has been tripping over itself to honor and praise Gaghan. He won most of the major 2000 screenwriting awards, including an Academy Award and is now being considered (like Brain Helgeland before him) for possible directorial opportunities.

Now this is wrong.

Because no one took notice of the man UNTIL he admitted smoking crack while at work; ask yourself this, how many times did you hear Gaghan’s name mentioned in correlation to penning Rules of Engagement? How many times did you hear his name prior to his admission of using drugs in January of 2001?

In Hollywood wannabe actors, writers and directors have done all sorts of crazy things to stand out from the pack–Quentin Tarantino once posed as a reporter and interviewed Brian DePalma–this is not new. But Gaghan has essentially separated himself from the crowd by, of all things, becoming known as a junkie! And now an Oscar winning junkie.

Ideally we would like to believe that it is a lack of talent that weeds out the unenlightened, but in this case, it seems it is something else doing the weeding instead.

Being addicted to drugs is a terrible thing for anyone to go through. Addiction is a disease that is tough to over come, both for the individual and those around him. As a country, America has been reminding people to ‘just say no’ for as long as I can remember. Doesn’t it seem a little strange that someone is being rewarded for saying yes?

Of course, this brings up another point, since drugs seem to be working well for Robert Downey Jr. and other celebs in terms of success, what kind of message is this sending to our society?

If people out there are buying Miller Lite or Budweiser because there are bikini clad girls in the commercials, what kind of a jump is it to believe that people will start using crack or heroin because it looks as if Stephen Gaghan got his big break in Hollywood because of the fact that he did?

- Jackson Casey