Pubdate: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 Source: Daily Gazette (NY) Copyright: 2002 The Gazette Newspapers Contact: http://www.dailygazette.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/105 Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/campaign.htm (ONDCP Media Campaign) EMPLOY IDEALISM, NOT ADS, AGAINST DRUGS Regarding "Blowing Smoke," Abigail Trafford's Washington Post piece on the new White House anti-drug advertising campaign (Feb. 17 Sunday Gazette), I couldn't agree more that the message of the television spots is simple-minded and jingoistic. Unfortunately, where government money meets the ad business, that's what you get. I'm not saying that there isn't a kernel of sense in the simplistic logic of the drugs=terror equation. It is not, though, that anybody will be convinced that drug use finances terrorism in the direct and exclusive way these ads insist it does. Osama bin Laden's money appears to derive from the family construction business, for example. The sad thing here is that we're just not giving kids credit for having the ability to discern - even to formulate - a stern moral point about real consequences of drug use here and in distant places without having it forced upon them with all the subtlety of North Korean propaganda. In May 1995, The New Yorker published an article by Andrew Weil titled "The Politics of Coca." A striking anecdote in it was about Bolivian forest-dwelling Indians for whom coca was as much a part of communal life as coffee or tea are to ours. As a culture, they had adapted beautifully and successfully to their forest environment. Completely self-sufficient, they had never been "on the grid." For millenniums, they had availed themselves of the coca leaf's bracing effects with no addiction or social problems. It was only after they were brought into the orbit of the outside economy, when they were employed - or should one say enslaved - to produce coca leaf for the cocaine traffickers and paid in money and consumer goods, that their ancient culture of self-sufficiency crumbled, social disorder took root and alcohol abuse became rampant. In what way is this different from the dispossession and genocide of the American Indian? Rare is the American youngster who would want to have been part of that. Throughout my lifetime, I've seen our relatively altruistic American youth sometimes more and sometimes less enthusiastically take up causes ranging from environmentalism, to farmworkers rights, to ending war, gender inequity and racial discrimination without millions of dollars being spent on Madison Avenue to produce slick advertising aimed at huge television audiences. The story is legendary in the public relations business that it was a schoolchildren's protest that caused McDonald's to drop its styrofoam clamshell packaging because it wouldn't break down in landfills. The ads I saw on Super Bowl Sunday are not going to ignite a children's crusade. But that's not to say that it can't happen. Especially if we refrain from "blowing smoke" at kids. TERRY O'NEILL, Albany - --- MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager