Anti-drug ads don't seem to work You remember all those anti-drug ads you were seeing for the last, uh, eleventy gazillion years? The ones that were so prevalent and ridiculous that a whole culture of parody has sprung up around those ads? In what is potentially a surprise to almost no one with any critical faculties available to them at all... the ads apparently don't work: A congressionally mandated study released today concluded that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign launched in the late 1990s to encourage young people to stay away from drugs "is unlikely to have had favorable effects on youths." In fact, the study's authors assert that anti-drug ads may have unwittingly delivered the message that other kids were doing drugs, inadvertently slowing measured progress that was being made to curb marijuana use among teenagers. Here's the best part: Here's the best part: The study's authors called the findings, published in the December edition of the American Journal of Public Health, "particularly worrisome because they were unexpected." Uh, suuuuure, no one on earth expected messages from the government - a bastion of credibility on the topic of "things we might enjoy in private without destroying our lives" - to fall on deaf ears. Oh sure, the ONDCP disputes the study, noting teen marijuana use is down; but there's no explicit link between the fact and the fact of the carpet-bombing of anti-drug ads that were delivered. In fact: Uh, suuuuure, no one on earth expected messages from the government - a bastion of credibility on the topic of "things we might enjoy in private without destroying our lives" - to fall on deaf ears. Oh sure, the ONDCP disputes the study, noting teen marijuana use is down; but there's no explicit link between the fact and the fact of the carpet-bombing of anti-drug ads that were delivered. In fact: In one part of the analysis, teens who recalled seeing 12 or more anti-drug messages per month were actually more likely to start using marijuana than those who had seen fewer anti-drug messages per month. Which just proves the maxim that even bad publicity is good publicity. Of course, if there were truly evidence that marijuana was more destructive to a person than alcohol or cigarettes, we might have something to go on here. Sure, it's regrettable that kids get involved in drug use when they're too young to appreciate all the consequences, but heavy-handed "your brain is a fried egg" bullshit when kids' brains are clearly not getting fried by casual use is not the way to build credibility. Which just proves the maxim that even bad publicity is good publicity. Of course, if there were truly evidence that marijuana was more destructive to a person than alcohol or cigarettes, we might have something to go on here. Sure, it's regrettable that kids get involved in drug use when they're too young to appreciate all the consequences, but heavy-handed "your brain is a fried egg" bullshit when kids' brains are clearlygetting fried by casual use is not the way to build credibility. » more at: www.abcnews.go.com Posted By Scotto at 2008-10-17 00:28:36 permalink | comments Tags: war on drugs ONDCP advertising marijuana » More ways to bookmark this page





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