Our
view
Anti-drug campaign is dishonest
“ I helped kill a judge.” “I helped
murder a family.” These statements may sound
familiar because they are similar to statements
used a while ago in commercials created
by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign,
an organization sponsored by the U.S. government’s
Office of National Drug Control Policy.
These
commercials portray average looking teens
apathetically confessing to appalling crimes
of murder, kidnapping and terrorism.
The
objective of the commercials is to create
a link between drug use and the support
of terrorism in the minds of the American
youth. The commercial ends with the statement
“Drug money supports terror. If you buy
drugs, you might too.”
The
slogan goes along quite well with the statement
President Bush gave.
“It’s
so important for Americans to know that
the traffic in drugs finances the work of
terror, sustaining terrorists, that terrorist
use drug profits to fund their cells to
commit acts of murder,” he said. “If you
quit drugs, you join the fight against terror
in America.”
The
problem with these commercials and the link
itself is that they are an explicit use
of dishonest propaganda.
The
U.S. government is using middle-class American’s
negative feelings toward drugs to rally
up support for the “War on Terrorism.”
However,
not only is the link between purchasing
drugs and terrorism weak, the commercials
are discriminatorily directed.
Watching
the commercial it becomes apparent that
it is aimed at young, mostly minority teens.
And without explicitly saying it, the commercial
insinuates that it is the purchase of marijuana
that supports terrorism.
The
fact is there is little that connects the
marijuana market with terrorism. There have
been connections between the illegal sale
of heroin and terrorism but that is one
drug, not drugs.
Furthermore,
if the government claims that the illegal
purchase of drugs funds terrorism, a simple
solution would be to legalize certain drugs
and monitor their sale. But that’s too simple.
Not
only that, the same people who cannot stop
talking about drugs and terrorism probably
do not give a second thought to the origin
of their tennis shoes, clothing or food
on their plates, and not all of those things
are derived from such pure, moral means
either.
The
purpose of this article is not to glorify
the use of drugs in anyway. Drugs are bad
… OK. However, it is important to look closer
into the message that commercials are trying
to convey. Don’t let your anti-drug sentiments
be manipulated. The War on Drugs and the
War on Terrorism are not the same things.
It is important that that distinction is
made.
|
