There is an interesting and telling News story in this weeks edition of the NORML Newsletter sent out every Thursday. It tells us something reformists, government, and drug warriors have all known for some time now, that anti-drug ads do not work. And more disturbing is they have the opposite intended effect. Specifically, it mentions anti-marijuana ads that depict actual handling and use of marijuana. I mention this story because it is very important for us to re-prioritize and overhaul the steps toward getting to a point of preventing children from using harmful drugs. When we use a campaign that not only allows children to feel more comfortable with certain drug use, even if it is just marijuana in some cases, and that campaign includes results which show a more disturbing trend, actually encouraging and improving the chances of someone to use, we absolutely need to rethink what we are doing immediately, and decide what direction we need to take in order to change it. If you think for one second this study rings true just for marijuana, then we are greatly mistaken. The program in schools called D.A.R.E. shows children how to recognize harsh drug use and its effects in better detail than any TV commercial from the ONDCP has created. In fact the programs we use to prevent children and others from using are actually helping them become familiar with drugs and how to use them. Children and others who would otherwise have NO contact with meth, heroin, lsd, acid, mushrooms, and even prescription drug abuse are shown how they are used in these progrmas. We are literally handed an instruction manual to the world of drugs on TV and in school. But, the drug warriors refuse to abandon a slowly sinking ship. And refuse to even believe what they are supporting has such negative effects. What makes the ship slow sinking is the people on the drug warrior side are so lost and misguided, and they hold those beliefs of hope that the current system works in some way so close, as close as their religious beliefs, and they in return refuse to make any concessions or talk about failures in the current program because they think if they do children everywhere will be maimed and murdered and overdose on horrible drugs. Even the talk of changing the current way we handle anti-drug policy is blasphemy to them. And, then if that doesn’t cover the reason for someone supporting failing and incredibly harmful programs and policies, it’s they believe we need to be harder on drug crimes and drug dealers. That what we are doing isn’t working because we just aren’t doing enough of it. They say we need more money, and more people in jails, and maybe even to start putting people to death for dealing drugs. “Yeah that will work.” They say. The beliefs they hold are kept alive by something none of us can forsake or argue with. The safety of our children. Until most of us stand up and recognize this system is harmful, the rest will just be too scared to change. We are satisfied as people, Americans, that the statuesque is sufficient. But, what is scarier to me is the reality the government thinks it knows best how to run our lives, and how to prevent drug use by law enforcement. They will continue to think so until its too late and the whole ship is under water, and everything we hold dear is with it.
If you listen close enough to the water, you will still hear muffled voices of “What about the children?”.
Its scary.
Philadelphia, PA – NORML.ORG - Anti-drug public service announcements that feature teens using marijuana are less likely to dissuade viewers from experimenting with pot than are advertisements absent such images, according to survey data to be published in the journal Health Communication.
Investigators at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania assessed the attitudes of over 600 adolescents, aged 12 to 18, after viewing 60 government funded anti-marijuana service announcements. Specifically, researchers evaluated whether the presence of marijuana-related imagery in the ads (e.g., the handling of marijuana cigarettes or the depiction of marijuana smoking behavior) were more likely or less likely to discourage viewers’ use of cannabis.
Messages that depict teens associating with cannabis are “significantly less effective than others,” the researchers found.
“This negative impact of marijuana scenes is not reversed in the presence of strong anti-marijuana arguments in the ads and is mainly present for the group of adolescents who are often targets of such anti-marijuana ads (i.e., high-risk adolescents),” authors determined. “For this segment of adolescents, including marijuana scenes in anti-marijuana (public service announcements) may not be a good strategy.”
Since 1998, Congress has appropriated over $2 billion to fund anti-drug advertisements as part of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. Independent reviews of the campaign have determined that the ads fail to discourage viewers from trying marijuana or other drugs.
In 2006, a study published in the journal Addictive Behaviors reported that teenagers who were most often exposed to the ad campaign were also most likely to hold positive attitudes about marijuana and were most likely to express their intent to use it.
For more information, please contact Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, at: paul@norml.org. Full text of the study, “The effect of marijuana scenes in anti-marijuana public service announcements on adolescents’ evaluation and effectiveness,” appears in Health Communication.