SUPER BOWL HIGHS: NOW EVEN ANTI-DRUG COMMERCIALS PLAY OFF 9/11.

There were a handful of times last night when the packed living room where
I watched the Super Bowl seemed to fall silent with concentration. One came
when the New England Patriots' Adam Vinatieri lined up to attempt his
game-winning field goal with seven seconds left. Another came during one of
several advertisements sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Built around the (true) premise that terrorist groups and states that
harbor them, such as Afghanistan, have been known to traffic in drugs, the
ads accused American drug users of financially supporting terrorism.

Full disclosure: I'm a football fan, not an ad critic. But on a Super Bowl
night when, for once, the football was first-rate and the advertising was
mostly forgettable, the anti-drug spots were a glaring exception to the
trend. They were, in short, impossible not to notice.

For those who design anti-drug ads, anti-smoking ads, anti-alcohol ads --
anti-anything ads -- the general strategy has long been to produce
something that will cut through the haze of banal admonitions and scare the
hell out of impressionable viewers. Last night's anti- smoking commercials
sponsored by the group "truth" were a textbook example of this tactic:
Cigarettes contain the same ingredients as rat poison, one warned.

The new anti-drug ads, however, took a completely different tack, playing
not on drug users' fears for their personal safety, but rather on their
sense of social conscience -- indeed, their patriotism. Buying drugs, the
ads implicitly argued, could make another terrorist attack possible. It
could let America's enemies win.

In one sense, such an approach betrays a profound idealism. Whereas the
conventional anti-drug, anti-smoking, anti-alcohol strategy seeks to
exploit Americans' concern for themselves, the new ads seek to exploit our
nascent concern for country. The assumption that such a tactic might be
effective says a good deal about the degree to which patriotism and shared
destiny have triumphed in the wake of tragedy. We are all communitarians now.

Whether or not the ads will actually work is another matter. But you have
to admit the reasoning behind them is clever. For one thing, they're
clearly aimed at young, marginal drug users -- not long-time addicts.

Let's say their target audience is made up of seventeen year-olds who may
or may not decide to use drugs recreationally on any given weekend.
Seventeen year-olds often feel invincible, which is why they're more
inclined to engage in high-risk behaviors like driving recklessly or having
unprotected sex. When it comes to such a demographic, fear-mongering ads
aren't likely to register. Yet even a fearless seventeen year-old may have
a social conscience; and even those lacking much political awareness were
likely affected emotionally by September 11. So where scare tactics have
failed to reach young people in the past, why not play on their new spirit
of patriotism?

But while the idea behind the Office of National Drug Control Policy ads
may be idealistic, provocative, even clever, it's not entirely original. In
fact the concept recalls a controversial anti-smoking campaign from the
early 1990s that explicitly targeted blacks. The ad campaign included
posters featuring a cowboy skeleton lighting a black child's cigarette
under the slogan, "They used to make us pick it, now they want us to smoke it."

That campaign was more narrowly aimed than last night's Super Bowl ads. But
both ask viewers to forget the self-destructive personal impact of smoking
and drugs, and focus on how the "evildoers" -- those who enslaved your
ancestors or those who are at war with your country -- benefit from your habit.

Invoking historic tragedies to unrelated ends runs the risk of cheapening
the memory of these events by over-extending their lessons. But as long as
post-September 11 patriotism is being used to sell everything from cars to
beer, it's hard to argue with using it to sell a worthwhile message about
drugs. That the ads were jarring enough to make football fans -- watching
one of the better Super Bowls ever played -- think briefly about something
other than football is not a bad initial measure of success.