War on Drugs becomes War on Terrorism
The so-called war on drugs has long been an issue in the national press. As long as I can remember, campaigns like "just say no" have been encouraging children to stay away from illegal drugs. ... The purpose of such messages is to frighten drug users and prospective drug users into abstaining from use and to turn the public eye onto drugs in general. ... If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you. ... The next target audience of the ad is the average American citizen; any non drug-using, Christian, middle-class person sees the message as hard evidence that drugs caused the World Trade Center attacks, along with any other terrorist acts within the last 30 years. The final audience for this commercial must be older people, since they do not like to think about drugs at all, let alone as tools for terrorism. If my grandfather saw the commercial, he would likely say something like, "Those jerks who blew up the buildings got their money from drugs. Dont you do drugs, now. ... It would be hard to assume that terrorists coordinate and perform their attacks without the help of computers, so while illustrating this, the commercial manages to quietly accuse computer companies and computer hackers of aiding terrorism. Along the lines of hackers, cyber-terrorism has recently become a bigger problem, so perhaps the computer depicts alternate (but still highly damaging) methods of terrorism. ... All of the short video segments are images of war and terrorism. ... The problem is that the commercial took the war on drugs issue a step too far.