NEW ANTI-DRUG ADS TAKE US ON A BAD TRIP

I hate the drug trade for personal reasons. As far as I'm concerned, every
mind-altering substance imaginable conspired to turn my old neighborhood in
West Philadelphia into a scene straight out of "Night of the Living Dead."

There's nothing redeeming about any substance that systematically strips
people of their ambition, their common sense and their link to humanity.
I've seen up close what drugs and alcohol can do. I have friends who once
believed they were immune to their pernicious effects. Some are still
alive, some aren't.

Economically disadvantaged folks, like those I grew up with, turn to legal
and illegal drugs for comfort just like affluent people. Having never
gotten high or drunk even once in my life, I can only imagine what the
appeal of losing a grip on reality is for poor folks who can least afford it.

I suppose drugs and alcohol provide a tonic for the despair that has been
common to the human condition from the beginning. I've noticed a perverse
social acceptance among those who indulge that transcends socioeconomic class.

Drunks and drug abusers of all incomes engage in the same rituals and
rationalizations. Really, there's no difference between drug-abusing
Hollywood icons like Robert Downey Jr. and the muscatel freaks I knew back
on Oxford Street except the degree to which we're willing to forgive
addicts their trespasses if they've gained a little social status.

Perfectly respectable people assure me that as an "accidental teetotaler,"
I'm blind to a slice of human existence that's as valid as anything I'll
ever encounter in my stifling sobriety.

Alas, I'm unsophisticated enough not to care. What would I do with
hallucinations, "visions from God" and pink elephants? Such things would be
wasted on me. My imagination is vivid enough without turbo- charging it
with alien fuel cooked up in outlaw basements or corporate-owned distilleries.

Still, my glass isn't completely clean. After 15 years of marriage, it
would be unnatural if I hadn't acquired a taste for wine by now -- at least
in moderation. But I'm at a stage where a full glass of the stuff is more
than enough to deliver me into the arms of sweet Morpheus, a fact my wife
never tires of needling me about.

Perhaps that's why I'm so puzzled by the full-page ads that ran in The New
York Times and USA Today yesterday. The ads featured larger-than- life
faces of average "drug-using" Americans. These words were scrawled at the
bottom of both ads: "Drug money helps support terror. Buy drugs and you
could be supporting it too."

Between the eyes of the two faces ran the following confessions: "Last
weekend, I washed my car, hung out with a few friends, and helped murder a
family in Colombia. C'mon, it was a party" and "Yesterday afternoon, I did
my laundry, went for a run, and helped torture someone's dad."

This is supposed to make drug abusers think twice about scrambling their
own brains? I thought being "drug-addicted" meant a person was, by
definition, self-absorbed and not inclined to respond kindly to appeals to
conscience.

Will millions of Americans who've made illicit drugs a billion-dollar
industry for foreign cartels and domestic gangs respond more agreeably to
suggestions they give up their addictions because Colombians are being
tortured?

Huge swaths of our urban streets have become slick with the blood of
Americans who are similarly "tortured" because of illicit drugs. Why limit
the discussion to Colombians when there is "domestic terror" closer to home?

When 8-year-old Taylor Coles died in a hail of bullets at a Homewood
restaurant last month, her murder fit the definition of drug-related
terrorism as neatly as anything that happened in Bogota that day, didn't it?

But Taylor's death is overlooked by an ad campaign that tries too hard to
link "terrorism" and "drugs" in the American mind. We don't need more
bogeymen. What we need is a frank discussion about the place of drugs --
all drugs -- in American life. Alcohol, cigarettes and legally prescribed
drugs kill more people than illicit narcotics every year, but we've become
fixated on street drugs as the source of all evil. Yes, they're evil, but
they're a symptom of a much greater sickness.

Drug abuse is one of the worst things that ever happened to our nation.
When are we going to have the courage to face its challenge without
resorting to propaganda?