Pubdate: Fri, 15 Feb 2002
Source: Free Press, The (NC)
Copyright: 2002 Kinston Free Press
Contact: http://www.kinston.com/Contact.cfm
Website: http://www.kinston.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1732
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism)

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.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager