If you saw last night’s 24, I think you can guess what this thread is about.
Remember the “If you buy drugs, you support terrorism”? commercials? Remember how they were mocked as quite possibly the worst anti-drug ads ever?
Well, the ONDCP has a word or two for YOU, Mr. Smartypants!
Just when I thought their ads had hit a new low, last night they hit us with this piece of genius:
“So, what’s this about drugs supporting terrorism?”
“It’s a fact.”
“Really? What do you mean?”
“It’s a fact”.
No mention of how it’s a fact. No mention of how they arrived at this conclusion. Hell, not even any mention of opium growers in Afghanistan, which is one of the few things they could actually use to support their argument.
And then, after another commercial, they hit you AGAIN.
“Ok, say I buy some dope, hypothetically. How much of that gets to terrorists? A couple bucks?”
“So you’re saying you support terrorism a little?”
Oh my God. Someone either failed Logic 101 because there are so many holes here, or passed it and know their argument is bullshit.
Maybe their next commercial is going to have some hippie smoking up and then hijacking a plane.
So, are you saying you support terrorism in principle, because you use drugs?!? And, if you then sold the dope, you and terrorism would be colleagues! And then what would you say to it at the Christmas Party?
The current commercial killing me is the one where the kids are smoking up in the bathroom at a concert, when some narc barges in, slams them around, and cuffs them…
Fade to black, while an ominous voice intones
“Marijuana can get you Busted”
So, if you’re following kids, pot is bad because it gets you busted. It gets you busted because it’s bad because it gets you busted because… Aw, fuck it, I’m getting dizzy.
If anything demonstrates the lack of substance in the “War” on otherwise law-abiding drug users (Because let’s be honest, we aren’t busting, incarcerating, and destroying drugs, but rather the everyday joes who use them) it is the bottom-of-the-barrel antil-logic they use in these commercials.
Well, but belladonna isn’t the argument, “You shouldn’t use marijuana because it’s illegal and you may get arrested” a good argument against marijuana use? While it doesn’t address whether marijuana should be illegal or not, the risk of being arrested and punished is still an argument against it’s use.
CA - it’s certainly what I’ll tell my kids, if I get around to having any. But I’ll be honest with them that that’s my only argument against smoking dope - that it could get them into legal trouble that their old man might be unable to bail them out of.
I think belladonna’s point (which would be mine also) is that anti-drug commercials that can’t make a good anti-drug case, irrespective of the laws, demonstrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the drug laws and those who defend them.
After all, tobacco is perfectly legal, and most of us here could write an anti-tobacco commercial that made ten times as much sense as any anti-drug commercial I’ve ever seen.
By that logic you are much more likely to be supporting terrorism by buying gasoline for your automobile, depending upon which station you buy it from. I think its mildly amusing that terrorism is the new el nino as being the source of every problem.
Also, regarding the “drugs make you an idiot” commercials with running over people and shooting your friends, there are quite a bit more cases of involving the very legal and more easily obtainable alcohol.
Oh well, not a bad thread to lose my SDMB virginity!
Well, maybe, but the Office of National Drug Contol Policy didn’t make those laws, Congress did, and Congress can repeal them. That Congress hasn’t seems to suggest that the majority of the population are satisfied with the status quo, or at leat not upset enough with it to make it an issue.
[quoteThat Congress hasn’t seems to suggest that the majority of the population are satisfied with the status quo, or at leat not upset enough with it to make it an issue.[/quote]
And why is the majority of the population satisfied with the status quo? Could it, perhaps, have something to do with a 70-year-long-and-counting propaganda war?
Maybe, but I think it’s more likely that a lot of people don’t use marajuana regularly and so a lot don’t see any particular reason it should be decriminalized, while many of those who do use it regularly aren’t affected much by the laws, because they’re so sporatically enforced and because the supply of marajuana is so large.
The people haven’t voted for an end to the war on some drug users because we don’t vote on issues, we vote for people who agree with us on the issues, and in this case there isn’t anyone to vote for. (And because many people are actually voting against the politician they don’t want, which means voting for their most popular opponent. This is kind of a vicious cycle.)
It’s the politicians that want the status quo - there’s no definitive way of telling what the people want.
Obviously, the people making these commercials are too straight to see how fucked up their logic is. If they’d just loosen up and smoke a bowl before meetings, their ads would be much more creative.
“So, what’s this about the War on Drugs supporting terrorism?”
“By making it illegal to privately grow opium and manufacture heroin here, we force those who sell it to outsource to nations with nothing better to do than grow dope and plan our downfall. Millions of untaxed dollars spent on illegal drugs flow like a river to Afghanistan and other Evil Places.”
“Isn’t all of that illegal?”
“So was alcohol.”
I was shocked to see The Nation run one of these ridiculous ads this week. And they put it next to Alexander Cockburn’s column (Cockburn wrote Whiteout, which examined US Govt complicity in drug trafficking). I couldn’t help thinking the editors were tweaking Mr. Cockburn a bit – several contributors have sniped at him recently.
