Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

President Clinton recently announced a new 5 year $2 billion saturation advertising campaign as his latest major initiative in the war on some drugs. The big advertising agencies and media companies favored by those in control of the billions earmarked for this program are expected to profit handsomely, but there are many who question if the taxpayers will get any positive result from this massive propaganda campaign.

The sample ads that accompanied the announcement were more of the usual emotionally manipulative video bytes playing on the fears of the uninformed. The ads contained no meaningful information and attempted to manipulate the emotions of the viewer by using abstracted images such as an attractive young woman smashing first an egg ("this is your brain on heroin") with a heavy iron frying pan and then proceeding to trash the rest of the kitchen. As usual the ads aggressively confuse the actual results of drug abuse with the results of prohibition itself - yet again attempting to attribute to the use of drugs those aspects such as crime, the spread of disease, and the creation of the alternative economy that are entirely the result of prohibition, not the drugs being prohibited. Of course the ads are at extreme variance with the reality of drug use in countries with rational drug policies such as the Netherlands, but that's never been a problem for the drug war propagandists before, and doesn't seem to be of the slightest concern in this new effort either.

Critics immediately pointed out that in spite of years of such deceptive ads there are no indications that they have had any meaningful effect on drug use, and that funding the new ad campaign would reduce the funding of proven effective programs such as treatment and diversion. Tests of the new ads on random young people indicated that while they found the young woman attractive, they consistently dismissed the message of the ads as just more government lies.

The claim by critics was that the ad campaign was a waste of the taxpayer's money. I suggest that from the perspective of the prohibitionists these new ads will serve exactly the purpose for which they are intended. The last thing the prohibitionists want is to actually solve the "drug problem" since this would eliminate their expanding power base, remove the basic justification for the existence of all of the various agencies that depend on the war on some drugs for their mandate, and put an end to the rich source of revenues gained through seizing the assets of citizens.

The greatest danger in the war on some drugs is the threat of an informed public realizing the terrible costs society as a whole is suffering from the ongoing insanity of prohibition, and putting an end to the travesty just as they did in response to the distressingly similar excesses of alcohol prohibition. There are disturbing signs in the political landscape that public support for the war on some drugs is slipping. In spite of aggressive government funded efforts against their passage, voters have passed measures attempting to force the right to use medical marijuana through direct democracy initiatives, and it is feared that this crack in the fragile facade of the drug war might expand and bring the whole mess crashing down. Far too much truth and rationality have managed to slip past the current propaganda effort. This potential danger is the real motivation for the massive new effort to saturate the media with politically correct lies and distortions in support of continuing prohibition and the accelerating erosion of freedom.

The key to the real targeting of the ads is the percentage of active voters in the various age groups. Having been denied any meaningful understanding of our political system by an incompetent and/or aggressively pro-big government education system - as well as the all too visible general failure of the political system they see around them - only a very small percentage young people register let alone bother to vote. Older voters, on the other hand, do tend to vote. To this end, while the new ad campaign is being justified by the usual claims of concern for "the children", the real target is the older active voter who has no personal involvement with the drug trade or sources of real information other than the compliant mass media.

It is hoped that five years of saturating the mass media with emotionally manipulative propaganda will once again so overwhelm the limited resources of those seeking to distribute the truth about the drug war that the truth will again be lost in the volume of noisy propaganda. The intention is to create and perpetuate an atmosphere of hysteria and unfounded fears in which the deceived citizens will be willing to surrender their freedoms in the vain hope of protection from this entirely manufactured danger.

If the prohibitionists really wanted to solve the drug problem they would concentrate on the honest education and treatment of that tiny minority of the population who have problems with various kinds of substance abuse. Contrary to the official justifications, the sole purpose of this new massive propaganda campaign to saturate the media with fear and misinformation is not to serve the needs of the citizens. The real purpose of the $2 billion propaganda campaign is the protection of the massively destructive war on some drugs from its most dangerous enemy - an informed public unwilling to continue allowing its rights to be eroded and the wealth of its society to be diverted in support of the abomination of prohibition.