Arianna Huffington Online Friday Feb 8, 02
Slick New
Drug-War Ads Misfire


he commander-in-chief's slick new $10 million ad campaign is one of the most offensive displays of drug-war propaganda ever. And that's saying a lot.

The TV spots, which premiered during the Super Bowl, promote the twisted reasoning that since terrorists are funded by drug profits, any young Americans who use drugs are guilty of aiding the enemy.

In one particularly odious ad, fresh-faced young people say, "I helped kids learn how to kill"; "I helped murder families in Colombia"; "I helped blow up buildings."

It's a slick dramatization of President Bush's meaningless assertion that "if you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America."

Apparently, in the world according to Bush and his drug czar, John Walters, the kid smoking a joint at a party is the moral equivalent of Osama Bin Laden or Mohamed Atta.

It's the single largest ad buy the federal government has ever made. The White House spent nearly $3.5 million to get these commercials on the Super Bowl — and that's $3.5 million spent not on drug treatment, but on demonizing America's young people. Our tax dollars at work.

It's one thing to drop an egg into a frying pan to demonstrate that drugs are bad for you, and quite another to link drug users to bloodthirsty murderers. These ads make it seem like the next logical step in the war on terrorism is dropping daisy cutter bombs on America's high schools and shipping teenage drug users off to Guantanamo Bay. With 54% of high school seniors admitting they've used illicit drugs, it's going to get awfully crowded.

The ads are also exercises in highly selective finger-pointing. We know, for instance, that Al Qaeda used tens of millions of dollars in profits from the diamond industry to fund operations. So why no commercial with a woman fingering the diamonds on her tennis bracelet admitting: "I helped kids learn how to kill"?

And, given the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers — and most of the detainees in Cuba — came from Saudi Arabia, why no taxpayer-funded ad showing a soccer mom in an SUV saying: "I helped blow up buildings"?

Simple. Linking diamonds or oil to terror doesn't fit the Bush agenda. It's hardly a coincidence that just one day after the Super Bowl ads aired, the White House released a foreign aid budget that escalates U.S. military assistance to Colombian troops battling drug traffickers.

At the end of the movie "Traffic," Michael Douglas' dispirited drug czar crystallizes the madness of the drug war: "If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don't know how you wage war on your own family."

Clearly, the Bush administration has no such misgivings.