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Nothing’s Sacred
Superbowl Ads: Making
the Case for Drug Legalization.
Kyle Lohmeier
Leave it to Bill O’Reilly to take an already annoying commercial, the
"buy dope, fund terrorism" Superbowl ads, and make them even more
obnoxious by applauding the commercial in the same column where he
mentions the war on drugs is a "$30 billion a year loser." Bill was
so close to arriving at the proper conclusion. Instead, however, Mr.
O’Reilly made the same mistake as the "gutsy" idiots who crafted the
ad and then wasted $4 million getting it on the air twice during the
Superbowl; assuming that putting the onus to quit funding terror via
drugs on drug users was going to accomplish anything. Since there’s
been no upturn in enrollment at detox clinics following either the
ads themselves or O’Reilly’s column about them, it’s safe to assume
that pressuring the nation’s most selfish and hedonistic demographic,
recreational drug users, isn’t the way to keep drug money out of
terrorists’ hands. It’d be akin to PETA appealing to the S&M crowd to
switch to vinyl bondage gear because leather is murder on cows. In
both instances, the target audience doesn’t sufficiently care about
the cause they’re being asked to change their lifestyle to
accommodate. This intimidation-by-guilt approach also begs a serious
question: Assuming that drug money actually funds terrorism, and that
shaming drug users into helping fight terrorism won’t work; exactly
how bad does the Bush Administration want that money out of
terrorists hands? Bad enough to consider legalizing them? Despite
O’Reilly’s polls claiming that most Americans don’t want drugs
legalized, that is the solution to the problem. Before discussing
this solution, let’s face one very unpleasant fact. America is the
largest market for recreational drugs; no one can even touch us when
it comes to the numbers. After all, we are the home of the Hummer,
the Double Whopper, the L.A.R. Grizzly and Michael Moore; when we do
something, be it trucks, hamburgers, pistols or idiots, or drug use,
we do it big. The fact of the matter is drug use is simply a part of
American culture, and an increasingly accepted part of it. Think
about it. Despite the series The Wonder Years being set during the
late 60s and early 70s, drug references were rare. A little more than
a decade later and Fox comes out with That 70s Show, which features
weekly pot references and occasional entire episodes about marijuana
use. While audiences ten years ago might have objected to Kevin,
Winnie and Paul sitting around and toking up during The Wonder Years,
nobody makes much noise about That 70s Show. Drug references in
popular music, especially to marijuana, have got to be at least as
prevalent in recent years
as it was during the supposed sex- drugs-and-rock-and-roll hay-day of the 60s and 70s.
Sure, you’d have the occasional "drug song" then, "Marijuana" by Country Joe and the
Fish, "One toke over the line," etc. But entire a
lbums called "The Chronic," with photos in the liner notes of the musician (Dr. Dre,
in this case) with his nose in a bag of luminescent green hydro buds? Eminem has
carved a career out for himself by rapping about little
else but drugs. Cypress Hill? Snoop Doggy Dogg? These aren’t obscure musicians making
music for their drugged out following, these are pop stars, icons, Billboard winners.
Whether or not anyone in Washington wants to adm
it it, drug use isn’t only common in America; it’s becoming a societal norm. Of
course, anti-prohibitionists like myself have made all these very true and rather
logical comments for a very long time. But don’t just take
our word for it; look at what the other side has been doing in it’s continuing effort
to stamp out drugs. Year after year, billions and billions of dollars are spent
cajoling, condemning, convicting and constraining drug
users and pushers. The nation’s current budget woes and lack of manpower for national
security, simply serves to throw the inherent rightness of the argument for
legalization versus maintaining current government policy i
nto stark relief. So what would happen if we did the unthinkable and ended the War on
Drugs? First, with the legalization of all drugs, there’d be a lot of DEA agents freed
up to do something useful for once in their care
ers. Retrain and reassign them as border patrol, immigration or customs agents and
train another batch of them as air marshals, thus making our nation more secure
without a net increase in the number of federal agents on
the payroll. Second, our underground (and therefore un-taxable) drug market is huge
and largely foreign, particularly when it comes to harder drugs like cocaine and
heroin. Now if the Bush Administration is all that worri
ed about junkies funding Al-Qaida or cokeheads paying the bills for Colombian
guerillas and potheads underwriting the costs of a stereo system for some high school
kid’s car, they need to face a very real reality: No comm
ercial is ever, ever going to convince even one drug user to quit. Recreational drug
users, being the hedonistic, selfish, and largely counter-culture lot they are, aren’t
going to toss their bongs, mirrors and syringes a
side out of national pride. Thus, one clever commercial and $4 million in ad space
later, America’s junkies are still funding Al-Qaida, cokeheads are arming Colombian
cartels, and potheads are putting subwoofers and amps
into Ford Escorts across our fair nation. And because Al-Qaida, Colombian cartels and
high school pot-pushers don’t report their drug profits to the IRS, what’s going on is
a lot of buying and selling of valuable goods on
U.S. soil without the IRS getting their cut. This, of course, doesn’t bother me since
I’d just as soon see the IRS disappear anyway, but I understand the IRS hates it when
they don’t get their cut of the action. So, inst
ead of the government’s current position on drugs, doesn’t it make more sense to
redirect those hitherto wasted anti-drug resources to something more important
(domestic security and counter-terrorism), and then encourage
domestic companies to get into the newly-legitimized (and therefore taxable)
recreational drug trade? Allow tobacco companies to put 20-packs of pre-rolled joints
on the market at just about any reasonable price, let the
government slap a tax on it and watch the treasury’s coffers fill to the brim. With
eight-balls and heroin and LSD etc. available at the corner store, with a hefty tax
attached, the congressional budget office could perm
anently throw away their red pens because the tax revenue generated by taxes on drugs
would be so great that not even the worst liberal Democrats in Washington could devise
a way to spend it all. Bush could fight his mult
i-front, third world war to his heart’s content while letting the Democrats put the
whole nation on the dole and still end up with budget surpluses. Of course, I’m not
the first person to point all this out. These are ide
as as old as the Drug War itself. They’ve always been the right idea, the logical
solution, the correct answer to the question of drug use. Naturally, government has
always ignored them. In government’s infinite ignorance
they will continue to wage the Drug War, and the Drug War will continue to be a
spectacular and costly failure. While the $4 million wasted on the Superbowl ad (not
to mention production costs of the ad itself) was a par
ticularly noticeable waste of money, it’s really no more than a drop
in the bucket compared to how much tax money the government pisses
away as it tries to eliminate illegal narcotics. Add to that the loss
of potential tax revenue to the black market and the war on drugs
becomes a staggeringly expensive defeat. Which brings us back to
where we began. Remember, it was the Bush Administration that made
drug funding of terror an issue with its useless Superbowl ad. Now
that this attempt, like all the other previous efforts, has failed,
perhaps the people in Washington should consider a different
approach, the one that has the greatest chance of succeeding. If our
president really wants that drug money out of terrorists’ hands, he
knows what he must do.
Kyle Lohmeier
End<{{{
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