DRUG-FIGHTERS HIGH ON THEIR OWN NONSENSE

Let me get this straight.

Some American kid smoking pot is to blame for the World Trade Center
terror attack?

Apparently so.

That's the message, anyway, of a glitzy new museum show that opened
yesterday on the first three floors at One Times Square, sponsored by
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

"Drug Traffickers, Terrorists and You," the exhibit is called, which,
if I'm not mistaken, was once the official slogan for Times Square.

OK, maybe not. But it probably should have been.

And all the top generals in the government's Official War on Some
Drugs gathered yesterday in cleaned-up Times Square for a
standing-room-only opening reception. All of them seemed to agree:
That 16-year-old with the pack of rolling papers in his jeans pocket,
he's pretty much responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

"If you use drugs, you are standing against the rule of law," warned
John P. Walters, the White House drug czar. "You are standing against
freedom. You are standing against those who fight against terrorism."

"Your drug dollars, this so-called victimless crime, fund people
around the world who do us grievous, grievous harm," added Deputy
Attorney General James Comey, after delivering the warm greetings of
his boss, John Ashcroft.

Like many anti-drug campaigns before it, this one rests on shaky
evidence and throws a fast emotional punch. Just inside the big glass
doors is a green 1994 Thunderbird, smashed like an old Budweiser can.
A few crayons, a toy truck, a couple of plastic ride-em cars and other
heart-wrenching symbols of childhood strewn not-so-randomly nearby.

The little write-up says the T-bird driver was high on coke and other
drugs when he killed a woman in Ohio.

Which is awful, I think we can all agree.

But that's just the start. The floors above are outfitted with
meth-lab mock-ups, hypodermic needles under Plexiglas, a brightly lit
model of a brain on drugs and photos of just about every famous
druggie who ever OD'd.

Jim Morrison! Judy Garland! Elvis must be here somewhere.

Maybe he got crowded out by Osama bin Laden, al Qaida, the Taliban,
Hezbollah and assorted other Middle Eastern terrorists, all getting
fat off the dollars of high-school pot smokers and South Bronx
crackheads. That highly tentative connection, anyway, is the real
message here.

To hammer it home, there's a prominent display of World Trade Center
debris accompanied by an audio sound track reliving Sept. 11 and tying
it straight to the drug trade.

"Terrorist organizations are turning to alternative methods of funding
for their activities," the museum material asserts. "One lucrative
revenue stream is the sale of illegal drugs."

Just look how close they are!

"While not always involving the same groups, drugs and terror
frequently flourish in the same environments," the write-up explains.
"It is small wonder then that opium production and terrorism
flourished in Afghanistan, just as coca production and terrorism
flourish in other countries, such as Colombia."

Which is kinda like saying, "It is small wonder Broadway and the Mafia
flourished in New York, just as lettuce-growing and car crashes
flourish in California."

So close, they have to be connected, right?

Unfortunately, the evidence for these connections runs from murky to
plainly overstated to partly-true-but-hardly-the-point.

Sure, terrorists have raised money from all kinds of sources,
including the drug trade and any number of official United States IRS
503c charitable groups. The Mid East Fund for Easing of the Pain of
Blessed Martyrs' Families, that sort of thing.

And the biggest terror-funder of all? The sale of oil to the
West.

Didn't most of the 9/11 hijackers come from Saudi Arabia? Hasn't Saudi
money supported those hate-filled madrases for years?

You want to starve terror? Get out of that SUV!

We got the first sniff of this exaggerated drug-and-terror link in the
anti-drug ads at the Super Bowl in 2002. The spots were widely
criticized, even within the anti-drug community, as unsupported by any
firm evidence.

But now the message is back. The messengers are as unapologetic as
ever. None of this should come as any surprise.

It's a political decision, really.

Since the War on Terror pushed its way to the top of the national
agenda, America's long-running War on Drugs has found itself a little
edged out. The public has been losing interest. So have Congressional
funders.

Nothing like a little talk of terror to focus the mind in
2004.

You should have seen the crowds at the museum opening yesterday!