The Drug Czar’s office spent millions of dollars of your tax money this weekend to run two anti-drug TV spots during the Superbowl. (You can see one of them here. Warning: Quicktime.) Of course, it’s a better bargain than that, because Fox is required to cough up additional ad time at some future date, but in any case the government spent some money on ads during the Superbowl in an attempt to convince you not to get high.

Interestingly, these are the first ONDCP anti-drug ads I’ve seen that contain any truth at all. Most of the Drug Czar ads have a certain, shall we say, lack of concern for accuracy. These ads have the simple message that drug purchases fund criminal organizations (specifically, terrorists).

It’s undoubtedly true that the purchase of anything on the black market, by definition, funds criminal organizations. In the United States, the only significant black market is in drugs.

It’s not unlikely that some of these criminal drug-selling organizations fund terrorist activities with their money. So in a way this is a ground-breaking ad for the ONDCP, as it’s not based on half-truths, outright lies, and pointless fearmongering.

But I wonder whether this will backfire on the Drug Czar, because it points out the obvious: that the problem with illegal drugs is not the drugs part, but the illegal part. Our three legal drugs in the United States are alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine: Anheuser-Busch, Phillip Morris, and Starbucks do not fund terrorism.

If the priority is to eliminate drugs-based funding for terrorism, the Drug Czar should shut down the Drug War and resign; that’s far more likely to succeed than are TV ads that attempt to eliminate a market for a product that’s in demand.