The Drugs-and-Terror Ad Campaign

[RS Davis]

[glow=red,2,300]Paul Armentano Wrote:[/glow] “Where do terrorists get their money? If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you.” Or so claimed a year-long series of U.S. taxpayer-funded public service announcements (PSAs) alleging that recreational drug use sponsors international terrorism. Nevertheless, despite the Bush administration’s having spent tens of millions of dollars on the much-ballyhooed ad campaign, it’s painfully apparent that the American public isn’t buying their message.

So apparent, in fact, that the White House quietly decided in April to pull the plug on the controversial campaign theme, effective this past summer. Their decision came less than six months after an internal evaluation of the ads — which began pushing the specific drugs-fund-terror agenda shortly after September 11, 2001 — determined that they had failed to discourage viewers from trying marijuana or other drugs and in some cases had fostered so-called pro-drug beliefs among teens.

Talk about a blowback.

- Rick

[dr snootch]

If you buy marijuana, you may be helping to support an out-of-work, seasonally employed laborer who grows pot in his basement to help make ends meet during the off-season.

I think that's a much more likely scenario than pot-smokers helping bring down the World Trade Center.

[RS Davis]

dr said:

If you buy marijuana, you may be helping to support an out-of-work, seasonally employed laborer who grows pot in his basement to help make ends meet during the off-season.

I think that's a much more likely scenario than pot-smokers helping bring down the World Trade Center.

Truly.

You've gotta love the formula our government is following, though. They give subsidies to farmers, making it nigh impossible for 3rd world farmers to compete. Then they ban drugs, creating an inflated black market price, luring these 3rd world farmers into growing them, as they are the only profitable thing left to them. Then our government goes and drops all kinds of chemicals on the crops, the farmers, and their children. Do they just really have something against these people?

- Rick

[dr snootch]

RS said:

Truly.

You've gotta love the formula our government is following, though. They give subsidies to farmers, making it nigh impossible for 3rd world farmers to compete. Then they ban drugs, creating an inflated black market price, luring these 3rd world farmers into growing them, as they are the only profitable thing left to them. Then our government goes and drops all kinds of chemicals on the crops, the farmers, and their children. Do they just really have something against these people?

- Rick

Any excuse to bomb little brown people is a good excuse as far as our government is concerned. Also, the inhabitants of the Latin American countries don't get nearly the amount of sympathy from the general public as some other indigenous peoples.

A few televised international DEA operations go a long way toward keeping the pot-smokers in line, or so our drug policy-makers would have us believe. Shock and Awe for the past 30 years. They've got to do it in Mexico and Central America, though. Nobody'd stand for the DEA bombing and dropping chemicals on American soil and people, marijuana or not.

[RS Davis]

dr said:

Any excuse to bomb little brown people is a good excuse as far as our government is concerned. Also, the inhabitants of the Latin American countries don't get nearly the amount of sympathy from the general public as some other indigenous peoples.

A few televised international DEA operations go a long way toward keeping the pot-smokers in line, or so our drug policy-makers would have us believe. Shock and Awe for the past 30 years. They've got to do it in Mexico and Central America, though. Nobody'd stand for the DEA bombing and dropping chemicals on American soil and people, marijuana or not.

Agreed. It really ticks me off that there is such mountains of evidence against the morality and effectiveness of the Drug War, and yet people have been so brainwashed by forty years of government propaganda, you'll rarely find someone willing to look at the issue objectively.

- Rick