PROVOCATIVE WHITE HOUSE ANTIDRUG ADS STIR DEBATE

WASHINGTON - "Timmy," a fresh-faced teenager, stares from the TV screen and
says matter-of-factly: "I killed grandmas. I killed daughters. I killed
firemen. I killed policemen."

Then he adds, casually: "Technically, I didn't kill these people. I just
kind of helped."

A message at the bottom of the screen carries an ominous warning: "Where do
terrorists get their money? If you buy drugs, some of it may come from you."

Timmy and several other teens are the stars of a powerful, provocative
advertising campaign from the White House drug control office that uses
more than $10 million in taxpayer funds to link the war on drugs to the war
on terrorism.

It's in-your-face television, impossible to ignore. Some antidrug
activists, such as Peggy Sapp of Miami, praise the ads for "finally forcing
kids to face the consequences of their actions."

Critics of the drug war deride them as slick, packaged fear-mongering.

"Blaming nonviolent kids for terrorism is like blaming beer drinkers for Al
Capone's murders," said Ethan Nadelman, director of the New York-based Drug
Policy Alliance, which wants to decriminalize most drug use.

The campaign began with $3.5 million high-impact spots during the Super
Bowl. The ads will continue at least until June on TV and in print. The new
spots with Timmy and others will air nationwide in the next few weeks.

The goal: shame casual drug users by telling them that drugs help pay for
terrorism elsewhere, especially in Colombia, and maybe in the United States.

The new White House drug czar, John Walters, said in a recent interview
that they appeal to "young people's idealism" by putting drug use and its
impact in a wider, global context. Past public service ads focused on the
harmful effects of drugs on users and their families.

"We have many messages, but this is more powerful than anything else right
now," Walters said. "There's a heightened awareness since Sept. 11 that
there are real enemies and harms that can be brought home. And we were
careful to check all the facts."

But some analysts say the campaign is a political effort to repackage the
drug war as a critical component of President Bush's popular crusade
against global terrorism.

"The drug bureaucracy appears to believe that no one will take its drug war
seriously unless the federal government resorts to propaganda worthy of the
Soviet Union," wrote Christopher Caldwell, senior editor at the Weekly
Standard.

The connection between drug-trafficking and terrorism is at the heart of
arguments surrounding the ads. Each line of dialogue in the ads is
explained on the drug control office's Web site (theantidrug.com) by
real-world examples from Mexico and Colombia.

The office cites a State Department report from October that found that 12
of 28 terrorist groups traffic in drugs.

A strong link is relatively easy to demonstrate in Colombia, where
guerrillas and paramilitaries traffic in drugs while killing officials,
police and civilians. Colombian and Mexican officials have praised the ads,
saying it is U.S. demand for drugs that leads to carnage in their countries.

The language used in the ads suggests a direct link between drug
trafficking and the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked New York's World Trade
Center on Sept. 11. But the closest documented connection between al-Qaeda
and drug trafficking is that the former Taliban regime that sheltered Osama
bin Laden in Afghanistan profited from that country's long-standing opium
trade - while at the same time taking steps to halt it.

Investigators have also found that al-Qaeda made millions of dollars from
the diamond trade, which fuels vicious civil wars using child soldiers in
Africa, and many of terrorist leader bin Laden's operations were funded by
wealthy Saudi families that rely on oil revenue.

Critics such as Nadelman say the ads bypass the reality of teens' drug use.