DRUG PROHIBITION THE REAL CAUSE OF VIOLENCE

Your Feb 5 editorial on the government's Super Bowl anti-drug ads was
illogical. In these ads, drug-warriors smeared druggies as facilitators of
terrorist funding. Alas, the shoe is on the other foot.

Drugs can fund clandestine enterprises only because they're highly illegal.

A desired product that's criminalized can fetch exorbitant prices, thus
becoming a potential source of clandestine funding. It's not the substance
but the illegal status that's important. Criminalize toilet paper and it
too could fund terrorism.

Drug prohibition itself links drug money to clandestine funding. The
unspeakable but logical conclusion: America's drug-warriors are more
closely linked to terrorism than America's druggies are. Thus, a more
accurate ad might show a drug-czar or a DEA agent declaring: "I helped fund
terrorists," or "I helped kill civilians in Colombia."

Obviously, neither teen-age potsmokers nor hard-line drug-warriors endorse
terrorism. Any such unfounded insinuation is reprehensible. Yet
systemically, both can be implicated, the drug-warrior more so than the
druggie.

The ads spuriously condemn drug users while denying the culpability of the
federal drug-control bureaucracy, which incidentally paid the Taliban $43
million last year to eradicate opium poppies. How much of that funded
terrorism? The government's ads are dishonest and inflammatory. They
disingenuously attempt to link the very unpopular war on drugs with the
very popular War on Terrorism, exploiting the public's high-pitched
emotions for political gain.

Rather than wasting millions on harsh rhetoric, let's find ways to reduce
both kinds of harm: the harms caused by making the drugs illegal, and the
harms caused by actual drug abuse. Both issues deserve dispassionate
consideration.

PAUL M. BISCHKE

ST. PAUL