NPR had an excellent commentary about the ad campaign by Alicia Montgomery this week - you can listen to the sound file by clicking here.

In it, she describes growing up in an inner city neighborhood where it is now too dangerous to allow children out to play. She now lives in the suburbs, and her suburban friends who use recreational cocaine or other drugs make no connection between their behavior and the downtown drug wars that kill and maim innocent civilians in order to make drugs available for their "harmless" recreation.

She would like to see the ad campaign focus on the terrorism and violence that the drug trade supports here at home, but since its victims are just inner city poor people instead of New York financial district elite, it probably won't matter as much to the middle-class users at whom the campaign is aimed...

The ad campaign makes the valid point that illegal drug use has consequences that go beyond its effect on the individual user. We can debate until we're blue in the face about whether recreational pharmaceuticals should be illegal, but as long as they are, those who purchase them are complicit in the crimes committed to make the drugs available, and the crimes supported by the profits of the trade.

This is one reason why I feel that the US government's emphasis on punishing producer countries without supporting drug treatment programs for the end users here in our own country is a lopsided and self-defeating policy.