If Truth Were the Anti-Drug

If you were one of the 130 million people who tuned into the Super Bowl this year, you were probably among the first to see a series of commercials in which young men and women give chilling testimonials about their contributions to worldwide terror.  “I helped kill a judge,” confesses one; “I helped to kill a family in Colombia,” intones another. These were not young acolytes of Osama bin Laden. They are actors playing American teens, and their purported crime is buying drugs.

At $3.5 million for two 30-second spots, the ads mark a new, expensive and cynical phase in the government’s war on drugs. While avoiding any explicit reference to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the message is clear. As the administration explains in a press release, “Americans who buy and sell illegal narcotics are lending a helping hand to people like those who attacked America on September 11^th.” 

The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) takes credit for connecting the war on drugs with the war on terrorism in its National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, an idea that developed shortly after September 11th. In addition to what Ad Age describes as the single biggest government ad buy in history, the campaign includes an “anti-drug” website and educational materials tailored to middle- and high-school students.

The campaign rests upon the powerful assertion that there is a direct link between those who buy or sell drugs in America and the terrorists responsible for the attacks.  This is serious charge; yet it is one for which the administration offers no factual basis.  According to the State Department, terrorists typically rely upon “ideological supporters, money siphoned off of legitimate and illegitimate charities, legitimate companies that are used to generate profits and transfer funds to terrorist groups, and ordinary crime such as extortion and robbery.”  Indeed, during a recent Congressional hearing investigating the link between drugs and terrorism, an administration official cautioned against “thinking that international terrorism generally is dependent upon funds from drug trafficking or international crime.” 

If there is evidence of a direct link between Americans who buy or sell illegal narcotics and those responsible for the attacks on September 11th, the administration has not disclosed it. Information has surfaced concerning the source of funds used by Osama bin Laden and his conspirators, but that information does not point to drug proceeds from Americans.  For instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has identified some potential sources of U.S. money for Al-Qaeda, including a network of businesses that were raided last fall, as well as charities the administration claims to be fundraisers for the terrorists.  Moreover, while bin Laden has a substantial personal fortune estimated in the millions of dollars, the source of that wealth is reportedly his family’s fortune derived from various construction businesses.

Finally, the administration finds it significant that bin Laden and his cohorts were based in Afghanistan, for years the largest producer of opium in the world and a major exporter of heroin.  But this does not demonstrate the link claimed by the ONDCP.  According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which monitors routes used to ship illegal narcotics around the world, the principal destination of heroin originating in Afghanistan is Western Europe, not the United States.  The CIA states that the amount of heroin shipped from Afghanistan to North American is “undetermined” but so negligible that it is typically smuggled through the mail or by courier on commercial airlines.        

Creating a campaign based on inflammatory, opportunistic and unsupported claims is not an effective national drug policy. Such tactics are more likely to generate cynicism than to educate the public about consequences of drug abuse. Indeed, for too long politicians in both parties have relied on misleading claims to justify the punitive measures of the war on drugs and to bolster their own “tough on crime” postures. The result is a set of policies that impose unacceptable social and economic costs on an increasingly skeptical public.

Drug abuse is a genuine problem that the administration must address. But rather than embark on an expensive and misleading advertising campaign, the ONDCP should use its resources and media access to implement policies that actually work. The administration should begin by seeking to repeal or modify of some of the more egregious legislation inspired by the war on drugs. 

At a time when treatment for drug addition is available to just 20 percent of those in need, according to the administration’s estimates, a core priority of ONDCP should be to commit adequate resources to provide treatment alternatives. Equally important, the administration should work to change the federal sentencing guidelines that apply to drug offenses – guidelines that have resulted in excessive prison sentences and gross racial disparities among those convicted of drug sentences.  Penalties for offenses involving crack cocaine, for example, are 100 times more severe than for the same offense involving powder cocaine, the drug favored by the wealthy and the white.  This arbitrary distinction means that possession of five grams of crack cocaine, which is worth about $500 on the street, triggers a mandatory five-year prison sentence -- the same sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine, which has much higher street value.

 Tellingly, while the majority of users of crack cocaine are white, federal defendants convicted of crack possession were 85 percent African American and only ten percent white in 1996, according to the most recent study by the United States Sentencing Commission.  The result is an explosion in the number of African Americans serving disproportionately long sentences in federal institutions for non-violent drug offenses. 

            Other measures designed to impose excessive punishments on those convicted of drug offenses should also be repealed.  In the Higher Education Act of 1998 Congress included a provision that denies student loan eligibility to any person convicted of a drug offense. Even a first-time charge of simple possession of marijuana is enough to trigger a penalty, which ranges from losing loans for a single year to a complete lifetime ban on federally guaranteed student loans for a person with three or more drug possession convictions.  In similar fashion, when Congress reformed the nation’s welfare laws in 1996, it enacted a provision that imposes on any person convicted of a state or federal felony drug offense a lifetime ban on receiving food stamps or cash assistance.  No other class of offender, including those convicted of rape or other violent offenses, faces similar restrictions on eligibility for student loans, food stamps or cash assistance from the federal government. Such punitive measures are counterproductive because they impose continuing sanctions on people who are in dire need of help.

The ONDCP has a responsibility to educate Americans about drug abuse and to tackle the problem at its source. But it will not meet this obligation by resorting to a campaign that exploits Americans’ fear of terrorism and attempts to mislead us about the issues relating to illegal drugs. There is important work to do in this area, but the ONDCP cannot provide meaningful assistance if it squanders its credibility on unsupported claims. If truth is indeed the anti-drug, as the Super Bowl ads claim, the ONDCP could benefit from a dose.