WHAT? OUR NATION'S WAR ON DRUGS? HELLO?

TURNS OUT THAT one of the programs that's part of the government's war on
drugs is something called the National Drug Control Strategy, the goal of
which is to "educate and enable America's youth to reject illegal drugs as
well as alcohol and tobacco."

One of the objectives of this strategy, which costs about $929 million a
year, financed mostly by taxpayers, is to "pursue a vigorous advertising
and public communications program dealing with the dangers of drug use by
youth."

Being a government program, it is subject to periodic evaluation. One such
evaluation was recently concluded by Westat, a private research and data
collecting service, together with the Annenberg School of Communication.
The quotes above are from that evaluation.

Here's the key finding: "Thus far there is little evidence of direct
Campaign effects on youth. There is no statistically significant change in
marijuana use or in beliefs and attitudes about marijuana use, and no
tendency for those reporting more exposure to Campaign messages to hold
more desirable beliefs."

A shorter way to say that would be: It doesn't work. The money was wasted.
There are, need I say, no plans to shut down the program as a result of
this report. The entire War on Drugs is not really about stopping drug use;
it's about being seen to stop drug use. It's about image.

The use of psychoactive substances by humans is older than history; humans
have always wanted to get loaded. There are healthy and less healthy ways
of doing that, but the War on Drugs is not about health, or it would right
now be spending all its energies trying to ban alcohol and tobacco.

Right now, the best anti-alcohol campaign on television is "Cops," whose
eternal message is "booze makes you stupid."

I IMAGINE THE abuse of drugs by young people is a problem with many causes.
A lot of these causes are the downside we pay for our modern life --
boredom, fractured families, the lure of mass communications, the wonders
of modern chemistry.

It's part of a system, and it's very very difficult to use the system
against itself. Dedicated cultural revolutionaries have tried to hack the
mass media, and the results have been spotty and inconclusive. You wanna
fix it, change the system. If you can't do that, move. None of this is
rocket science.

Look at it this way. If your government came up with a series of ads that
said, in one way or another, "don't eat cookies," would that discourage you
from eating cookies? I don't think so. Illegal drugs are already, well,
illegal -- if the threat of jail time doesn't work as an inhibiting device,
what chance does a TV ad have?

It's retrenching time in the War on Drugs.

ERRATA: IT HAS been brought to my attention that my dreamy view of the
dissent during the Civil War was perhaps just a tiny bit completely wrong.
Lincoln compared dissenters to deserting soldiers; he suspended habeas
corpus and threw his critics in jail; he closed down newspapers that
disagreed with him. Union soldiers who did not like the Emancipation
Proclamation -- and there were plenty of them -- were advised to shut up
and keep fighting.

My apologies to the truth.