New anti-drug campaign equates smoking pot with terrorism - Haaretz - Israel News
Israel’s Anti-Drug Authority has launched a new campaign featuring Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, aimed at deterring Israelis from smoking marijuana.

As part of the campaign, the authority has published a poster showing the Hezbollah leader emerging genie-like from a bong.

Underneath the image, the poster reads: “Hezbollah is clearly planning to flood Israel with narcotics. Narcotics pose a strategic threat to Israeli society. Whoever uses narcotics is giving a hand to the next terrorist attack.”

The Israeli media last week quoted senior Israeli security sources as saying that Hezbollah is planning to flood Israel with drugs in an effort to harm its citizens.

Police and IDF troops on the same day stopped the largest shipment of pure heroin ever to be intercepted on Israel’s border with Lebanon, a total of 32.5 kilograms, with an estimated street value of NIS 30 million.

Gee, Israel’s only five years behind the US effort to link bongs with bombs and tokin’ with terrorism in an ad campaign that was roundly criticized not only for the idiocy of its message, but for the fact that the ads had the opposite of the intended effect - adults and teens distrust these alarmist messages and rates of use and favorable perceptions of marijuana among teens may actually increase.

Plus, how exactly is it that Hezbollah forces these helpless Israeli citizens to take drugs? Doesn’t there have to be a demand for drugs in order for the so-called “flood” strategy to be effective? I also wonder how much of that pure heroin originated from Afghanistan, where we’ve let the Taliban regain power from the profits of the country’s farmers producing most of the world’s heroin? Wouldn’t it be more strategic to focus on terrorists’ production of heroin than to demonize Israeli pot smokers?

Terrorists are making their money from heroin, not marijuana. Even so, a heroin addict is not to blame for Hezbollah’s profit from drug dealing, prohibition is to blame. If that heroin addict was getting a maintenance dose from a government clinic, there would be less profit for Hezbollah.