WHITE HOUSE FINALLY LEARNS DRUG LESSON

America isn't buying the purported link between terrorism and drugs,
promoted by Washington officials through a five-month ad campaign.

Big surprise.

The White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy is ending its $150
million drugs-and-terror advertising operation. Also ending will be the
incomplete $8 million per year study, which found the ads were not working.

The commercials feature teen drug users explaining how buying drugs
supports terrorism. Other ads use a six degrees of separation approach to
link drug purchases in a local town to funding international terrorists.

Bill Maher, author and outspoken television host, brought the issue to
light in his latest book, "When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden."

"The real axis of evil in America is the genius of our marketing and the
gullibility of our people," Maher wrote. "It's a deadly hook-up when you
can sell 'em anything, and the American people have been sold drug paranoia
so long it's a tradition."

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which teamed with the ONDCP for
all previous campaigns, fell noticeably unsupportive of the drug-terrorism
ads, claiming the commercials were off-strategy.

But the dogmatic drug office continued running the ads, including two Super
Bowl spots totaling $3 million - a lot of cash for a failed experiment in
propaganda.

Drug use can be a terrible thing, but it doesn't mean it has ties to other
terrible things, like terrorism.

"Teenagers who are buying drugs are not killing families in Colombia,"
wrote Christopher Caldwell in The Weekly Standard. "They're not even
'helping' to kill families in Colombia. They are just buying drugs."

Even if the ONDCP started implementing honest campaigns, past experience
dictates continued failure.

The results of a National Institute on Drug Abuse survey agreed: "Exposure
to prevention messages outside school, such as through the media, was
fairly widespread but appeared to be unrelated to illicit drug use or being
drunk."

And there lies the faulty logic. After spending millions of taxpayer
dollars on a fallacious ad campaign, the White House learned teens did not
respond to the commercials. Osama bin Laden, meanwhile, is still a free man.

It is no surprise the ads didn't work. The five months it took for the
government to scrap the expensive flop is the real shock.