Traffik (1989): What Comes from the Earth Is Not Evil
by Saad Khan
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Title: Traffik (1989)
Director: Alastair Reid
Writer: Simon Moore
Format: Six-part television drama
Original broadcaster: Channel 4
Cast: Jamal Shah, Talat Hussain, Faryal Gohar, Ismat Shahjahan, Rahat Kazmi, Bill Paterson, Lindsay Duncan, Linda Bassett, Peter Bourke, Tilo Prückner
Traffik isn’t remembered as often as it should be.
The six-part serial traces a single route: poppy grown in Pakistan, refined through Europe, consumed in Britain. It aired in the summer of 1989, won an International Emmy and multiple BAFTAs, and later became the structural blueprint for Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic. The remake is bad. The original is good.
What Traffik understands, with rare clarity, is this: drugs are not cultural failures but administrative ones. They exist because systems permit them, because money moves faster than responsibility, and because blame is pushed toward the weakest point in the chain.
The series begins where most drug narratives refuse to start. Not with addiction. Not with police. Not with courts. It begins in the borderlands of north-west Pakistan, along the Khyber belt, where a field becomes a crime scene.
Jamal Shah plays Fazal, a Pashtun poppy farmer. He is not naïve or ignorant. He understands land, labor, family, and survival. His masculinity is quiet and unperformed. He does not explain himself. He measures his options. When his crop is destroyed under Western-backed eradication policy, he is not rehabilitated or redirected. He is displaced.
Ismat Shahjahan, playing Fazal’s wife Sabira, gives one of the most exact performances of rural Pakistan seen on British television at the time. She plays an illiterate farmer’s wife without caricature or pity. Her intelligence is practical. Her tenderness restrained. Her fear unspoken. It lives in her eyes, in how she looks at her husband, and in how she gathers her children as they move from place to place following his livelihood.
There is a lineage here that matters. Sabira carries the same puzzled stoicism seen in Durya Kazi’s performance in Jamil Dehlavi’s The Blood of Hussain. Both women embody a peasant femininity shaped by labor rather than language. Neither performance relies on explanation. In both cases, it was their only film appearance. Both performances are real.
This is where Traffik draws its moral line. Rural Pakistan is not framed as backward or criminal, but as vulnerable to policy written elsewhere.
One of the series’ most important scenes unfolds as a van climbs toward Darra Adam Khel. Roomana, played by Faryal Gohar, confronts a British official overseeing anti-poppy efforts.
The official insists heroin kills people and is illegal, so poppy farming must be shut down. Roomana responds with a simple comparison. Alcohol kills people too. Alcohol is banned in Pakistan, yet Britain does not destroy its vineyards for exporting brandy and spirits abroad. Why should farmers be punished for growing the only crop that feeds their families?
The scene exposes the imperial logic of the drug war. Western addiction is treated as a domestic problem. Non-Western livelihoods are treated as security threats. The farmer becomes the enemy because he is the easiest to punish.
Later, the British official is persuaded into smoking opium with Roomana’s kin, who presses the point further.
If drugs are killing people, then the crime is not the soil. The crime is everything added after it: refinement, routes, protection, finance, corruption, demand.
The series does not romanticize the borderlands, but it names their realities. The arms economy points toward Darra Adam Khel, long known for gunsmithing and weapons trade. Guns are not decoration. They are infrastructure. Protection, intimidation, and commerce move together. The same terrain that once managed empire now manages supply chains. The language has changed. The logic has not.
When Fazal is pushed off the land, the story moves to Karachi. Not postcard Karachi. Karachi as interface: port, paperwork, offices, walled houses, servant quarters, and men fluent in English, development language, and plausible deniability.
Talat Hussain plays Tariq Butt, a Karachi power broker who runs the heroin network with calm authority. Rahat Shah Kazmi moves within the same world. These are brown sahibs: educated, polished, respectable. They sit between British officials and Pakistani reality, translating violence into policy language.
They talk about stopping drugs while managing the system that distributes them.
Karachi is shown as a true port city, where goods lose their origin and gain value. Nothing illegal happens loudly. Everything happens through meetings, transfers, favors, and cooperation. The violence here is not spectacular. It is bureaucratic.
This is where the borderlands and the port city reveal their connection, not as metaphor but as mechanism. Eradication destroys land. Displacement produces vulnerable labor. The city absorbs that labor and recruits it into service. The same system that creates the loss then offers survival inside its own machinery.
There is a moment when Tariq Butt’s son is found partying, a potential scandal. Fazal is the only servant brave enough to speak up, earning conditional trust. His displaced family is moved into the servant quarters of the very network that profits from the drug trade.
This is the loop Traffik refuses to soften. State intervention creates displacement. Displacement creates dependency. Dependency is folded back into the system as loyalty and labor.
Roomana moves between worlds. She understands enough to see the lie, but not enough power to dismantle it. Her knowledge isolates her. Her presence prevents the series from collapsing into simple oppositions.
Only after Pakistan and Germany does the series arrive in Britain. A Home Office minister discovers his daughter is addicted to heroin. Distance collapses. Policy becomes personal. Britain is already inside the problem.
There are no clean hands here. No single villain. No moral center outside the system.
The series’ form carries its politics. Documentary footage of poppy harvesting and processing interrupts the drama, insisting on procedure over fantasy. Shot on location and on film, Traffik gives Pakistan a visual weight rarely afforded to it in the region’s largely escapist cinema of the late 1980s. This was realism, backed by Channel 4.
Through Channel Four Films, founded in 1982, Channel 4 used television money to fund risk-taking, cinema-grade projects outside the mainstream. Alongside Traffik (1989), it supported films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Salaam Bombay! (1988), Immaculate Conception (1992), and Bandit Queen (1994). Channel Four Films was dissolved in 1998 and later re-emerged as Film4. Traffik belongs to this brief moment when public broadcasting, internationalism, and political realism aligned.
At the same time, Traffik carries the contradictions of its moment. English dominates much of the dialogue where it would not realistically be spoken. Female nudity appears with a casualness reflecting British television’s belief that exposure equaled seriousness. Male nudity is absent. These tensions are part of the period.
Traffik took two years to research and five months to film. Scenes were rewritten after growers corrected the writers on how heroin is actually produced. That care shows. The series rejects the fantasy that drugs are a foreign contamination imported into the West. It shows one continuous structure: demand, money, policy, ports, enforcement, hypocrisy.
Traffik matters because it understands structure. It understands how violence travels politely. It understands that destroying poppy fields is not justice. It is displacement.
What comes from the earth is not evil.
The poppy is not the crime.
The pipeline is.
