WHITE HOUSE THAT DIDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT

Last May, a study in Addictive Behaviors reported that the White
House's much-touted and expensive anti-marijuana television ads "might
not only change young viewer's attitudes to more positive toward the
substance, but also might directly increase the risk of using marijuana."

That's right. A campaign that has so far spent nearly $1 billion to
reduce drug use may have succeeded in encouraging more young people to
try drugs.

For some time conservative Republicans have raised questions about the
program and the money being spent on it. In August a probe by the
Government Accountability Office, pushed by our own Sen. Richard
Shelby, found essentially the same thing Addictive Behaviors found and
recommended that Congress cut funding of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy until it "provides credible evidence of a media
campaign approach that effectively prevents and curtails youth drug
use."

Shelby had asked for the GAO to examine the contracts funded to carry
out the campaign. One of these involved a company that evaluated the
media approach and found it unsuccessful. Drug czar John Walters
questioned the validity of the evaluation. This puts the whole program
in a classic Catch-22. If the evaluation is flawed, then the agency
has wasted $42 million carrying it out. If the evaluation is correct,
the government has wasted a lot more on a campaign that produced
results just the opposite of what it intended to do.

Which gets us to the war on terror.

Just as the anti-drug campaign fiasco was making the news, it was
bumped off the front page by a report that the government's own
intelligent analysis concluded that the war on terror is producing
more terrorists.

And there you have it.

A war on drugs that creates more drug users.

A war on terror that creates more terrorists.

If, as one wag put it, we could get the government to declare war on
the ivory-billed woodpecker, we could bring the bird back from the
edge of extinction.