It’s been a tough week.

I caught the flu, drank a little too much this weekend and had to make a trip to the emergency room after accidentally cutting myself. Well, no matter how bad it was, as I enjoyed the Super Bowl Sunday night with the rest of America, I faced the harsh reality behind my heinous actions.

As it turns out, I support terrorism.

I kill single mothers and young girls. I beat old men to death. I run over school girls on bikes, abandon babies under my care and now, I’m pregnant.

Well, at least according to the U.S. government’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, my use of marijuana supports all these things.

During the Super Bowl, several new ads from the government’s anti-drug campaign aired, including a spot called, ‘Ghost’ that shows a man sitting alone on a subway when a rag-tag group of drug war casualties suddenly appear across from him.

‘You killed us,’ they say in unison. ‘They slit my throat,’ a woman says to him. ‘I saw something I wasn’t supposed to,’ says a man standing next to her.

Another depicts a middle-age couple standing over a home pregnancy test gizmo. A title appears: ‘This couple is about to become the youngest grandparents in town,’ as the camera pans over to their derelict teenage daughter. ‘Marijuana impairs judgment,’ the voice warns.

Killing innocent people? Impregnating slim teenage girls? This is some serious stuff I’ve been up to.

If it all sounds unbelievable, just check out this message from another ad featuring the beloved characters of ‘Nick’ and ‘Norm’ who like to pretend they’re Quentin Tarantino:

Norm: Drug money funds terror.’ I mean, why should I believe that?

Nick: Because … it’s a fact?

Norm: A fact?

Nick: F.A.C.T. Fact.

Norm: So, you’re saying that I should believe it because … it’s … true. That’s your argument.

Nick: It is true.

Yeah, any questions?

If that exchange didn’t answer all your questions, you’re certainly not alone.

A survey, conducted by the private research firm Westat and the University of Pennsylvania, shows ‘no evidence the multi-million-dollar campaign is discouraging drug use.’ In fact, since anti-drug ads began airing in the early ’80s with ‘Just Say No’ and the infamous ‘this is your brain on drugs,’ omelet spots, no evidence has surfaced linking the hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising funds with any real results. And that information isn’t coming from the stoners who live across the hall, but the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy.

‘These ads aren’t having an impact on teenagers,’ Tom Riley, a spokesman for the office, told USA TODAY this summer. ‘We’ve spent millions on these ads and we are not seeing a return on the investment.’

I’m not advocating an all-stoner society, a utopia of teen drug use and cheap pot. I recognize the efforts of the government to curb both teen and overall drug use as a noble cause, but come on. The ads claim to present the ‘facts,’ but most teens or young adults who have yet to fry their brains on drugs find the stretch of the government’s arguments a little hard to swallow.

While drug money does indeed support terrorism to some degree, the arguments made by the commercials are suggesting: ‘If you smoked a joint, you may as well have hijacked the plane yourself,’ when in fact the ‘terrorism’ referenced is that of South American rebel groups. The only drug money connected to al Qaeda is $40 million earned by the Taliban from heroin and opium production, a drop in the global drug bucket.

Drugs do present serious health dangers which deserve to be promoted so that people can make educated choices about drug use, but the government’s continued use of half-truths to scare the public is a perpetuation of the ineffective zero-tolerance mind-set.

And by the way, I’m expecting in mid-September.

Jared Novack is a design editor at The Daily Orange. E-mail him at jnovack@syr.edu.

Published on August 30, 2004 at 12:00 pm