DRUG WAR CAN ONLY BE WON AT HOME

Newspapers across the country are featuring an advertisement authored by
the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy. Superimposed
across the dimly lit, somber face of a young man - your son, perhaps? - are
his purported words, On Saturday, I watched my little brother, rehearsed
with the band and helped bribe a judge to release a man nicknamed The
Butcher.' Below his image there's this admonition: Drug money helps support
terror. Buy drugs and you could be supporting it, too. Get the facts at the
antidrug.com. Get help at the National Treatment Hotline, 800-662-HELP.

The Web site includes a reiteration of the now well-worn story that
terrorist cells and guerrilla movements make money off of the illegal drug
trade. Presumably, the aforementioned Butcher is one of myriad no-goodniks
clogging the corrupt court system of some hapless, drug-trafficking Third
World land. One site link directs visitors to President Bush's recent
observation - offering new spin on Sept. 11 - that, ... the traffic in
drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists, and that, If you
quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.

It would seem to follow, of course, that if you choose not to quit drugs,
you are aiding and abetting terror. Indeed, you are a traitor to your
country, right?

Perhaps it's hard to blame the federal government's anti-drug warriors for
so ham-handed an attempt to exploit last year's attack on America; that
fateful date already has been appropriated for so many other causes in
similarly pretextual ways.

If only this latest campaign didn't beg so desperately for credulity. Much
like its many predecessor campaigns, this newest drug-war pitch serves for
the most part to illustrate how stubbornly Uncle Sam clings to his sense of
denial.

Drugs, alcohol, sex and many many other temptations for the young should be
first and foremost a matter for parental intervention. Parents cannot be
everywhere, but they are the best, the first and the last line of defense
against ill influences. Their efforts can and do lead to abstinence;
surely, their success rate is no shabbier than the government's, for all of
our tax dollars it spends and all the people it imprisons in the name of
keeping our kids off drugs.

Maybe in the broader context of that bloody, costly drug war, ads linking
terrorism and drug use - in other words, the tautology that bad guys have
few qualms about doing illegal things - are benign. At worst, they insult
the intelligence.

But they also help obscure the truth that the real drug war only can be won
at home, not in Washington.