Smarter Guy, Same Result
You cited: "...it's just too easy to walk onboard a commercial airliner with a sharpened pencil and take out a flight attendant" as a main reason a terrorist attack is probable. In the same sentence you fault the FBI and CIA's shortcomings. Yet you seem to feel that anything the government tries to do to empower itself (be it the CIA, FBI, what have you) to invade your precious civil liberties...to take that freshly sharpened pencil from your hand before you get on the plane...should be curtailed. It's unfortunate to hear that the juvenile and misguided commercial you described (I agree it sucks) bothered you so. As someone with an IQ well over 100, and, I would have to assume, well over yours, I would say that taking away a little freedom is a damn good place to start. Lobbing complaints at organizations, investigations, and chains of events that you know nothing about? Save it for the Bread Not Bombs meeting.
For the record, I don't think that tying terrorism and drugs together in an effort to get kids to stop doing drugs is ludicrous at all. As an advertiser, you go with what's hot. You know that. So tying drugs to terrorism to create the desired response in the kids is no different than tying Vodka-branded malt beverages to sex in an effort to create the desiered sales among the coveted 21-34 upper middle class demographic.
If you want to try to assign facts to it, which I know you don't (facts are generally the enemy of the opinionated)....reports published BEFORE Sept 11 indicated that an estimated 70-plus percent of the world's heroin originated in Afghanistan in 2000. It's a major cash crop over there, and we know Afghanistan, though in no way the sole source of terrorists, certainly fed a few into the system. Heroin addiction is a curse I would not wish on my worst enemies...having seen people close to me struggle with it, I can tell you it's brutal. Simple fact of the matter is that almost everyone who tries heroin, over 98% of the people who do, have tried other illicit drugs first. So if you extrapolate that way, the PSA has some validity to it.
But, like I said, it's just crappy advertising. Don't take it so personally.
Next week, we're going to install a robotic genius president at Cadbury's Confection Company, after the CEO blatantly misled us with that chicken-sounding rabbit in an attempt to unload some candy eggs.
