Target America

Jen and I took some time during our lunch the other day to visit the Target America: Drug Traffickers, Terrorists and You traveling exhibit at One Times Square. The exhibit’s message is obviously a serious one, but I have to say that it was a real hoot to see that crack den!

USA Today explains what the Drug Enforcement Administration, who put together the show, intended with its hard-hitting displays:

The overriding theme of the exhibit, visible from Times Square through plate-glass windows, is the link between drug trafficking and global terrorism.

The exhibit invites visitors to trace the path of cocaine and heroin from drug labs in Afghanistan and Colombia to the pockets of insurgents in Colombia and Peru and to such terrorist organizations as Hezbollah.

But it also makes a more controversial link between terrorism and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The exhibit includes a large display of debris collected from both sites. The exhibit does not specifically tie the attacks to drug trafficking, but it uses the events to explain how terrorists use the drug trade as one of several methods to fund attacks. It cites U.S. intelligence linking the Taliban in Afghanistan, and by extension its thriving heroin economy, to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

“Someone who thinks he or she is making an individual choice that won’t harm anyone else is not seeing the larger picture of where their money eventually goes,” says Anthony Placido, special agent in charge of the New York division of the DEA.

While I’m not opposed to drawing attention to how personal responsibility plays a role in geopolitical affairs — if one should be concerned about Nike sweatshops, then he or she should certainly be concerned about Afghan poppies or South American coca — I question how well the DEA’s logic holds up. Because if illegal drugs are bad, then why not just legalize them?

The libertarian Reason Magazine agrees:

In the end, the exhibit’s reason for being is to equate casual drug use with “narco-terrorism”—and it’s that equation which sets a new standard in government mendacity. (Well, perhaps not exactly new: This message was pioneered by a post-9/11 series of television ads produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy that rightly elicited widespread derision.) The idea here is that terrorist groups sometimes traffic in illegal drugs to fund their deadly activities; if you use illegal drugs, then you are complicit in terrorist actions.

Like any good propaganda claim, it’s not so much flat-out wrong as it is woefully—and purposefully—incomplete and misdirected. Some terrorist groups have indeed trafficked in illegal drugs because of the huge, black market profits involved and the lack of legal oversight. Similarly, drug traffickers (especially in Latin America) have committed acts of terrorism to protect their trade. Needless to say, the one clear solution to such problems is nowhere discussed in “Target America.” If the drug trade were legalized, black market profits—and violence—would disappear. When is the last time terrorists used, say, the tobacco trade to finance their operations?

Not counting Hezbollah’s cigarette smuggling, the point is well taken!