ONE WORTH SPREADING

A Super Ad Message

I was one of the estimated 10 percent of Super Bowl viewers who tuned into
the game mainly to watch the advertising. This year I was treated to a
football contest that rivaled (some say bested) the ad competition.

Along with many of the game's 130 million television viewers, I was rooting
for New England, partly because they were underdogs and partly because of
their mascot. If the Patriots were to ever rise to the occasion, this year
was their year.

Patriotic advertising also played a role this year, albeit a smaller one
than some industry analysts expected. Only four ads referenced terrorism
and/or Sept. 11, but two of them, both purchased by the National Office of
Drug Control in the U.S. government's largest-ever single advertising buy,
were so good they deserve a closer look and broader application.

If you watched the game, you probably saw them. Both were takeoffs on other
famous advertisements by MasterCard and Monster.com.

The first one brought up, in the MasterCard fashion, visual shots of things
associated with terrorists and their prices: fake IDs, $3,000; safe house,
$7,200; computer, $1,200; box cutters, $2. You get the picture. In the end,
the ad asks, "Where do terrorists get their money?" The next scene answers:
"If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you."

The second ad showed a series of young people, each with a personal claim
like in the famous Monster.com ads.

In the end, the screen reads, "Drug money supports terror. If you buy
drugs, you might, too." The final voice-over is a girl saying, "It's not
like I was hurting anybody else."

The National Office of Drug Control Web site is full of supporting
information for its two ads, including details of actual events behind each
line of dialogue in the second ad.

Some critics challenged the link as too oblique, and even the office's
spokesman Tom Riley said, "It's not like every dollar you spend on pot goes
to Osama bin Laden, but the Taliban raised $50 million a year on heroin sales."

The tie-in from recreational drugs to terrorist financing might be too much
of a leap for many people, but how about the tie-in from recreational drugs
to neighborhood crime?

As mentioned by a recent Voices letter writer, himself a convicted felon
and drug user, the facts are clear that criminals are disproportionately
drug users, and drug abuse is a factor in the majority of violent crimes.

The Justice Department reports that 57 percent of state prison inmates
serving time for a violent crime used drugs within a month of their crime;
nearly 1-in-3 was using drugs at the time.

National statistics seem sterile. Most of us can look around our own
communities, and we don't need a federal report to tell us that drugs
figure prominently in crime. Not everyone, however, was keen on the drug
control office bringing such high-profile presence to the issue of dirty
drug money and its corrosive corollaries.

The Drug Policy Education Group of Arkansas posted an article on its Web
site decrying the ads and making the argument that the black market for
drugs is the real problem.

"If there wasn't a War on Drugs," columnist Jim Dee wrote, "there would be
no such rewards or black market money in drug trafficking for anyone, not
terrorists, not crime syndicates, not the kid down the street who just
needs to make enough to support his own habit."

What's that guy been smoking? (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Just a few
paragraphs back, the article contends that the legal drug alcohol is the
true culprit behind the bulk of violent crime, and "overwhelmingly" so in
homicides. So the answer to that is--legalizing more drugs?

Irresponsible personal behavior is always a greater possibility when
judgment is impaired, and that impairment is precisely the result most drug
users are seeking; they like getting high. Does getting high mean that most
of them will commit violent crimes? No. But as the alcohol experience
demonstrates, legalizing PCP or meth or pot or cocaine wouldn't reduce
(and, if usage increased with legality, would likely raise) the incidence
of users committing violent crimes.

Does getting high mean they will make poor decisions about work, driving or
their family? Oftentimes, yes. The drug legalization crowd disregards the
cost in billions of dollars to business and industry that drug use
inflicts, both in lost productivity and actual injury. It disregards the
costs in motor vehicle accidents, in health problems resulting from
overdoses and chronic usage, in social problems such as divorce and child
neglect. Again, legalization would do nothing to address these costs and
might, in fact, exacerbate them.

It certainly would present another cottage-industry opportunity for trial
lawyers; drug use is likely as harmful to health as cigarette smoking. So
much for the savings from the elimination of a "black market."

If you buy illegal drugs, you might not be bringing down the World Trade
Center, but you're helping to bring down your own neighborhood, schools,
community and ultimately your own country. And that's even worse.