The film stars an international ensemble cast, including Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Michael Douglas, Erika Christensen, Luis Guzmán, Dennis Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jacob Vargas, Tomas Milian, Topher Grace, James Brolin, Steven Bauer, and Benjamin Bratt.

20th Century Fox, the original financiers of the film, demanded that Harrison Ford play a leading role and that significant changes to the screenplay be made.

Traffic was released in the United States on December 27, 2000, and received critical acclaim for Soderbergh's direction, the film's style, complexity, messages, and the cast's performances (particularly del Toro's).

General Salazar, a high-ranking Mexican official, interrupts their arrest to offer Javier a special assignment: apprehending Francisco Flores, a hitman for the Tijuana Cartel, headed by the Obregón brothers.

Javier arranges a deal with the DEA to testify against Salazar in exchange for electricity in his neighborhood to keep local children from being tempted by street gangs and crime.

Meanwhile, Robert's teenage daughter Caroline has been using cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin, developing a drug addiction after her boyfriend Seth introduces her to freebasing.

In San Diego, an undercover DEA investigation led by Montel Gordon and Ray Castro leads to the arrest of Eduardo Ruiz, a dealer posing as a fisherman.

Ruiz gives up his boss, drug lord Carl Ayala, the Obregóns' biggest distributor in the United States.

As Ayala's trial begins, his pregnant wife Helena learns of her husband's true profession from his associate, Arnie Metzger.

Facing the prospect of life imprisonment for her husband and death threats against her child, Helena hires Flores to assassinate Ruiz and end the trial nolle prosequi.

Some aspects of the plotline are based on actual people and events: At one point in the film, an El Paso Intelligence Center agent tells Robert his position, official in charge of drug control, does not exist in Mexico.

As noted in the original script, a Director of the Instituto Nacional para el Combate a las Drogas was created by the Attorney General of Mexico in 1996.

They read a script by Stephen Gaghan called Havoc, about upper-class white kids in Palisades High School doing drugs and getting involved with gangs.

[8] The film shortens the story line of the original miniseries; a significant character arc of a farmer is taken out, and the Pakistani plotline is replaced with one set in Mexico.

[9] Harrison Ford was initially considered for the role of Robert Wakefield in January 2000 but would have had to take a significant cut in his usual $20 million salary.

Senators Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Orrin Hatch, Charles Grassley, and Don Nickles, and Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, were filmed in a scene that was entirely improvised.

[9] The project was obtained from Fox by Initial Entertainment Group and was sold to USA Films by IEG for North American rights only.

[13] Del Toro, a native of Puerto Rico,[15] was worried that another actor would be brought in and re-record his dialogue in English after he had worked hard to master Mexican inflections and improve his Spanish vocabulary.

'"[13] The director fought for subtitles for the Mexico scenes, arguing that if the characters did not speak Spanish, the film would have no integrity and would not convincingly portray what he described as the "impenetrability of another culture".

[16] In the opening credits of the film, Soderbergh tried to replicate the typeface from All the President's Men and the placement on-screen at the bottom left-hand corner.

[8] The director acted as his cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews and operated the camera himself to "get as close to the movie as I can" and to eliminate the distance between the actors and himself.

[17][8] Soderbergh drew inspiration from the cinema verite style of Ken Loach's films, studying the framing of scenes, the distance of the camera to the actors, lens length, and the tightness of eyelines depending on the position of a character.

[9] Benicio del Toro had significant input into certain parts of the film; for example, he suggested a more straightforward, concise way of depicting his character kidnapping Francisco Flores that Soderbergh ended up using.

The site's critical consensus reads: "Soderbergh successfully pulls off the highly ambitious Traffic, a movie with three different stories and a very large cast.

[25] In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote: "Traffic marks [Soderbergh] definitively as an enormous talent, one who never lets us guess what he's going to do next.

[27] Desson Howe, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote: "Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who based this on a British television miniseries of the same name, have created an often exhilarating, soup-to-nuts exposé of the world's most lucrative trade".

[28] In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote: "The hand-held camerawork – Soderbergh himself did the holding—provides a documentary feel that rivets attention".

[29] However, Richard Schickel of Time, in a rare negative review, finds the film's biggest weakness to be that it contains the "cliches of a hundred crime movies" before concluding that "Traffic, for all its earnestness, does not work.

[31] Steven Soderbergh received dual nominations for Best Director that year for both Erin Brockovich and Traffic, winning the award for the latter.