EMPLOY IDEALISM, NOT ADS, AGAINST DRUGS

Regarding "Blowing Smoke," Abigail Trafford's Washington Post piece on the
new White House anti-drug advertising campaign (Feb. 17 Sunday Gazette), I
couldn't agree more that the message of the television spots is
simple-minded and jingoistic. Unfortunately, where government money meets
the ad business, that's what you get.

I'm not saying that there isn't a kernel of sense in the simplistic logic
of the drugs=terror equation. It is not, though, that anybody will be
convinced that drug use finances terrorism in the direct and exclusive way
these ads insist it does. Osama bin Laden's money appears to derive from
the family construction business, for example.

The sad thing here is that we're just not giving kids credit for having the
ability to discern - even to formulate - a stern moral point about real
consequences of drug use here and in distant places without having it
forced upon them with all the subtlety of North Korean propaganda. In May
1995, The New Yorker published an article by Andrew Weil titled "The
Politics of Coca." A striking anecdote in it was about Bolivian
forest-dwelling Indians for whom coca was as much a part of communal life
as coffee or tea are to ours. As a culture, they had adapted beautifully
and successfully to their forest environment. Completely self-sufficient,
they had never been "on the grid."

For millenniums, they had availed themselves of the coca leaf's bracing
effects with no addiction or social problems. It was only after they were
brought into the orbit of the outside economy, when they were employed - or
should one say enslaved - to produce coca leaf for the cocaine traffickers
and paid in money and consumer goods, that their ancient culture of
self-sufficiency crumbled, social disorder took root and alcohol abuse
became rampant.

In what way is this different from the dispossession and genocide of the
American Indian? Rare is the American youngster who would want to have been
part of that.

Throughout my lifetime, I've seen our relatively altruistic American youth
sometimes more and sometimes less enthusiastically take up causes ranging
from environmentalism, to farmworkers rights, to ending war, gender
inequity and racial discrimination without millions of dollars being spent
on Madison Avenue to produce slick advertising aimed at huge television
audiences. The story is legendary in the public relations business that it
was a schoolchildren's protest that caused McDonald's to drop its styrofoam
clamshell packaging because it wouldn't break down in landfills.

The ads I saw on Super Bowl Sunday are not going to ignite a children's
crusade. But that's not to say that it can't happen. Especially if we
refrain from "blowing smoke" at kids.

TERRY O'NEILL, Albany