FEDS WASTE MONEY ON ADS

The federal government has shown a lot of commercials lately. Consider the
spot that's been running in theaters. Four stoned guys repeatedly pull up to
a drive-thru and shout things that strike them as funny through the
intercom. Each time they get to the intercom, a child on a bike rides across
the path between the drive-thru and the street - apparently the kid rides
around the block in exactly the time it takes the four potheads to drive
around the generic fast food joint. After discovering that they don't have
any money, the driver punches the accelerator as the kid on the bike cycles
back for his predictable demise. Screen goes black as potheads panic and hit
the brakes. We hear crashing metal. Text informs us that marijuana slows
reaction time.

Still think marijuana's harmless? Well, yes, actually. Only a crack addict
from a commercial couldn't see through this one. First, marijuana does not
cause aggressive behavior, so punching the accelerator is out of character.
Second, the same commercial done with teenagers who were drunk rather than
stoned would have been more accurate, but we would have immediately grasped
the problem with its implicit argument that any substance that slows your
reaction time should be illegal. Any argument for banning marijuana that
would work just as well as an argument for banning alcohol is a bad one,
since we learned not to ban alcohol.

Consider "The Visit," a commercial that's so bad that it needed a title and
got to run during the Super Bowl. (Remember, your tax money is funding Dr.
Goebbels's latest masterworks, and it takes a lot of tax money to buy
commercial time during the Super Bowl.) This one starts with a lone subway
passenger reading the newspaper. The lights black out for a second, and when
they come back on, he's surrounded by the ghosts of the victims of drug
dealers. They explain that by buying drugs, our subway passenger has caused
innumerable rapes and deaths of torture and is funding terrorism. They
briefly relate their individual tales of woe. The lights black out.

Still think buying drugs is harmless? Again, yes. One must be a victim of
state-run education to not see what's gone wrong in this ad. (Even the
government's television crack addicts can see through this one.) Here, the
government is trying to get innocent drug users to adopt the guilt for the
drug warriors' own crimes.

Black markets lead to violence for two reasons. First, in a black market,
information about alternate suppliers is an artificially scarce good. That
allows each supplier to act as a monopolist, which drives up prices and
leads to violence by suppliers trying to maintain their local monopolies and
by consumers trying to get the cash necessary for the artificially expensive
goods. Second, because the black market is not governed by law, there is no
means to enforce agreements other than violence. This leads to an atmosphere
of distrust in which preemptive strikes are used to ensure cooperation. The
violence of the black market in drugs is the result of the illegality of the
substances, not of their inherent (and wildly exaggerated) addictiveness.

When the new ads ask whether we still think that drugs are harmless, they
are attacking those of us that think that drugs aren't harmful enough to
justify outlawing them. That is, the government isn't trying to get people
not to use drugs, it's pushing some laws on us with our own money. "Congress
shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech," but it will require us
to fund propaganda that tries to persuade us of lies that have caused the
deaths of thousands and the pointless incarceration of millions. You are
being forced to pay to be lied to.

Finally, consider one of the patriotic ads that the Ad Council, a non profit
private organization, aired late last year. A young man in a library
approaches the desk and asks for help finding a few books. The librarian
coldly informs him that these books are not available. The young man,
suddenly realizing why, says that he didn't know. She demands his name. As
he tries to run, two men in black come from the background to disappear him.
(Maybe his name was "Jose Padilla.") The image is replaced with text asking,
"What if America ... weren't America?"

A better question would have been, "What do we do now that America isn't
America?": The situation depicted in the ad isn't hypothetical. According to
Section 215 of the Nuremberg Law - sorry, the USA PATRIOT Act - "The
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the
Director ... may make an application for an order requiring the production
of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents and
other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism
or clandestine intelligence activities ..." As the American Library
Association noticed, that includes a record of the books you check out from
a library or buy at a bookstore. You might want to rethink that study of
Arab culture; checking out the Koran might get you an FBI file.

Section 215 further explains that your librarian must keep to himself the
fact that he has helped the U.S. government violate your constitutional
right to privacy: "No person shall disclose to any other person ... that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under
this section." This means that we'll never know to what degree the
government is using this new power. The Justice Department has rejected a
number of requests made under the Freedom of Information Act that the number
- not the targets, just the number - of warrants for library records be made
public.

This provision requires that librarians violate their professional ethics:
Point III of the American Library Association's Code of Ethics says that "We
protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with
respect to information sought or received, and materials consulted,
borrowed, acquired or transmitted." Not any more, you don't. That was back
in America.