Pubdate: Sun, 17 Feb 2002
Source: Duluth News-Tribune (MN)
Copyright: 2002 Duluth News-Tribune
Contact:  http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthtribune/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/553
Author: Paul M. Bischke
Note: The writer is a member of the Drug Policy Reform Group of Minnesota.

DRUG PROHIBITION THE REAL CAUSE OF VIOLENCE

Your Feb 5 editorial on the government's Super Bowl anti-drug ads was 
illogical. In these ads, drug-warriors smeared druggies as facilitators of 
terrorist funding. Alas, the shoe is on the other foot.

Drugs can fund clandestine enterprises only because they're highly illegal.

A desired product that's criminalized can fetch exorbitant prices, thus 
becoming a potential source of clandestine funding. It's not the substance 
but the illegal status that's important. Criminalize toilet paper and it 
too could fund terrorism.

Drug prohibition itself links drug money to clandestine funding. The 
unspeakable but logical conclusion: America's drug-warriors are more 
closely linked to terrorism than America's druggies are. Thus, a more 
accurate ad might show a drug-czar or a DEA agent declaring: "I helped fund 
terrorists," or "I helped kill civilians in Colombia."

Obviously, neither teen-age potsmokers nor hard-line drug-warriors endorse 
terrorism. Any such unfounded insinuation is reprehensible. Yet 
systemically, both can be implicated, the drug-warrior more so than the 
druggie.

The ads spuriously condemn drug users while denying the culpability of the 
federal drug-control bureaucracy, which incidentally paid the Taliban $43 
million last year to eradicate opium poppies. How much of that funded 
terrorism? The government's ads are dishonest and inflammatory. They 
disingenuously attempt to link the very unpopular war on drugs with the 
very popular War on Terrorism, exploiting the public's high-pitched 
emotions for political gain.

Rather than wasting millions on harsh rhetoric, let's find ways to reduce 
both kinds of harm: the harms caused by making the drugs illegal, and the 
harms caused by actual drug abuse. Both issues deserve dispassionate 
consideration.

PAUL M. BISCHKE

ST. PAUL
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