'ANTI-DRUG' COMMERCIALS DISTORT THE FACTS

FOR MY NEW Year's resolution, I resolve to call out the media on
propagandistic malarkey whenever I see it. And so, I present the following
for your consideration.

Something has really stuck in my craw since the Super Bowl of last year. A
very disgusting something I call "Patriotism--the Anti-Drug." This is the
newest hook of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America--buy drugs, and you support terrorism.
Inevitably, this produced a backlash from progressive watchdogs.

The latest headliner of the ONDCP's parade of propaganda is a spot
featuring the word "might" as the moral loophole. Probably an answer to the
skeptics crying that drugs have no direct link to terrorism, "Might"
features a middle-class businessman saying that it's okay to buy or use
drugs because it only might finance terrorism. He is in turn barraged by
his colleagues with examples where even "might" is presumably not okay.
It's okay that it might slaughter families in Colombia? It's okay that it
might spawn drive-by shootings in ghetto neighborhoods? And so forth.

What is so offensive about this fallacy is that drugs alone do not finance
terrorism, same as that they do not in and of themselves cause domestic
violence or claim responsibility for gangland shootings. In addition, the
audience for these commercials are mostly teens--so the inference is that
teenagers single-handedly finance terrorism when they buy a dime bag.

First of all, terrorism is financed by drugs--not just their pursuit, but
also their eradication. An example is that about two years ago, the US
financed the same Taliban it now condemns to destroy heroin and opium crops
in Afghanistan. Drugs themselves do not support terrorism; their illegality
does. The lawlessness in countries where trafficking prospers is not just a
cause of drugs alone, but decentralized, weak governments whose people are
desperate for money. And the illegal drug trade provides it. This is hardly
a thing that the war wagered on drugs can fix, but perhaps
decriminalization can.

Second, it is not fair to demonize drug users alone for terrorism, if at
all. If the story of America's youth getting high in the basement is
comparable to FARC planning another guerilla invasion, then it is just to
say that the man proposing to his wife with a diamond ring is washing her
with the blood of innocents or that one who heats his home or fuels his car
is helping to blow up an embassy. Because guess what--the terrorists are
financed by oil and diamonds, too. But these interests are harder to vilify
because they have a "legitimate" history, whereas drug use has always
carried with it a dark history based in people's baser instinct of fear.

Don't misconstrue my words. I am not supporting drug abuse by any means.
But I have come to view drug abuse as not just a mere matter of broken
morality. I see it as a phenomenon that has its roots in socioeconomic
failure and in biology. I believe drug users should be treated instead of
imprisoned. To link the failing drug war to the war on terrorism has the
disastrous effect of making traitors out of 14 million Americans. Is that
really a war on terrorism, or misdirection?

Finally, "might" as a moral loophole works both ways. There are no
absolutes in this war, and there is usually more than one cause for such a
terrible trends of violence; both domestic and foreign. They say drugs
"might" support terrorism; I say diamonds and oil might, as well. I say
there might be more to the war on terrorism than combating the drug trade.
I say there might be more to societal violence than the drug market, such
as poverty and outrage at societal injustice.

And I say the ONDCP might, just might, be selling us a line of
propagandistic bullshit.