Drug ads: Out of joint

This year's Super Bowl telecast cleared up a few important questions for me. Does defense win championships? Yes. Do I have an mLife? No, and I'm very happy without one, thank you. Is Britney Spears addicted to love, or to Pepsi? Both. Will this be the third Republican administration in a row to have a severely misguided approach to its national drug policy? Absolutely.

If you, like 90 percent of the country, drowned out Pat Summerall's commentary (and John Madden's idiotic drivel) with your chattering and then finally shut up when the commercials came on, you were subjected to two of the most alarming, disturbing, misguided, inappropriate pieces of jingoistic propaganda ever to masquerade as advertisements. Both were paid for by the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, and together cost more than $3 million to air. Both were intended as scare tactics, and the tagline on each was, in essence, the same: If you buy drugs, you're supporting terrorism.

First, a few concessions. Yes, 'evildoers' in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the 'axis of evil' do make sizeable profits trafficking heroin, cocaine, opium and the like. Yes, these drugs are bad for society, and they destroy lives and families. Yes, the Clinton administration didn't do much better at solving the problem than did the presidential administrations of Reagan or elder Bush.

However, by no means is this newest salvo in the asinine "war on drugs" the right tactic. It is merely another in a series of ill-conceived Republican scare tactics (D.A.R.E., Just Say No!) dating back over two decades with not a shred of success. Instead of adopting the same attitude toward marijuana that we have towards alcohol and tobacco (Legalize It, Don't Criticize It), opening methadone and rehabilitation clinics, reducing penalties for simple possession (thus, reducing the population in our overcrowded jails) and sponsoring needle exchange programs, politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to surge blindly ahead with the same old idiotic, racist, socially irresponsible, but politically prudent, policies.

What bothers me even more, though, is that this latest attempt to scare us away from using drugs by implicating simple users in terrorist plots is a wholly inappropriate conflation of wartime propaganda with domestic politics and a disgraceful appeal to the xenophobia and blind nationalism that the same government helped to create by perverting genuine patriotic pride following Sept. 11. I've said before that I do not condone terrorist attacks, nor do I blame the United States for them, and I'll hold to those statements now. But I also maintain that there are things we could have done that might have prevented so many people from feeling such tremendous hatred towards us. Though we might not all agree that the presence of American troops on Saudi soil is an egregious sin large enough to merit such a large-scale response, we cannot deem others "illogical" or "irrational" for feeling that way. We should make serious attempts to be good neighbors, not to piss other people off, to act — to a degree — in accordance with their terms, not always with our own.

The real "evildoers," domestically, are not drug users. They are those of us — at Princeton and elsewhere — who forget that within the right to free speech is entailed the right to disagree with the American government, even (especially) in times of war, who insist in the absolute righteousness of the American way, who vilify their fellow citizens for questioning certain aspects of the war effort, and who chastise their neighbors for remaining objective instead of getting swept up in the often dangerous fervor of thoughtless nationalism. The domestic 'axis of evil' is composed of the president, his drug czar and their ad agency, who together have the chutzpa and the audacity to use a legitimate, honorable cause, the war on real terrorists, to coerce and compel people to support a mostly unrelated and entirely wayward one, the war on drugs and drug users. They're not part of the solution, they're part of the problem. Those of us who are out tonight buying a $60 bag of weed or $100 worth of cocaine aren't hurting anyone other than ourselves. Dan Wachtell is a philosophy major from New York. He can be reached at wachtell@princeton.edu.