You gotta love this article in Slate about the failure of government anti-pot propaganda.
Since 1998, the federal government has spent more than $1.4 billion on an ad campaign aimed primarily at dissuading teens from using marijuana. You've seen the ads--high on pot, stoners commit a host of horrible acts, including running over a little girl on a bike at a drive-through. Or a kid sits in the hospital with his fist stuck in his mouth.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the arm of the federal government that funds research on drug abuse and addiction, partnered to study the ad campaign's effectiveness. The White House provided the funding and NIDA contracted with a research firm, Westat, which gathered data between November 1999 and June 2004. The report Westat produced cost the government $42.7 million. It shows that the ad campaign isn't working, as the Associated Press reported in late August. Instead of reducing the likelihood that kids would smoke marijuana, the ads increased it. Westat found that "greater exposure to the campaign was associated with weaker anti-drug norms and increases in the perceptions that others use marijuana." More exposure to the ads led to higher rates of first-time drug use among certain groups, like 14- to 16-year-olds and white kids.
Did we learn nothing from Reefer Madness? I mean, other than that it's really, really funny when government bureaucrats try and "talk to the kids" about drugs? And to no one's surprise, the government tried to cover this up:
But perhaps worse, and as yet unreported, NIDA and the White House drug office sat on the Westat report for a year and a half beginning in early 2005--while spending $220 million on the anti-marijuana ads in fiscal years 2005 and 2006.NIDA dated Westat's report as "delivered" in June 2006. In fact, it was delivered in February 2005, according to the Government Accountability Office, the federal watchdog agency charged with reviewing the study. In the time that has elapsed since, the White House justified the $220 million ongoing expenditure on the campaign on the grounds that the campaign was being scientifically evaluated.
Even better is this quote from Government Executive magazine:
"Last year, after Drug Czar Walters promised in Senate testimony that he would show results within a year or admit failure, Congress agreed to extend the campaign through 2003 while cutting funding for the ads from $170 million in 2002 to $150 million [in 2003]."
And funnier yet is this testimony from the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy from August of 2001, where he says:
We are investing $7 million a year in performance measurement to determine the effectiveness of the Media Campaign. Campaign effectiveness is measured for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) by Westat and its subcontractors, the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and the National Development and Research Institute (NDRI). We are encouraged by the findings to date. Westat data, from the most recent evaluation (April 2001) indicates high awareness of anti-drug messages -- 89 percent of youth and 93 percent of parents recalled seeing or hearing some form of anti-drug advertising at least once per month.
Somehow I doubt he'll be testifying about the conclusions of that study, that such high awareness of the ads actually increased drug use, not decreased it. And the real punchline to the joke is this: after spending 7 years studying the effectiveness of the program and telling Congress that they should keep supporting it because they're funding an objective, scientific study of the matter, guess what they said when the study finally came to light a few weeks ago? They said it should be ignored because the data is two years old. Hilarious.
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It's pretty obvious from their words and deeds that the guys running these ad campaigns are baked off their asses.
I remember in 7th grade, my first year of junior high school, they showed us all these "scare films" about pot that did nothing but make us more curious about trying it out for ourselves.
Why? Because the scenarios and characters in the films were so ridiculous, so obviously creations of adults who had no idea what we were really thinking and doing, that they are meaningless to us.
As with just about any group of young people, our peers held far more sway, some of whom were smoking pot and some of home were not, and the line between the good kids and the bad kids where I grew up was pretty blury.
We all hung out the same places and had many of the same friends. There were jocks were smoked pot and boys with long hair that did not.
And then... um... oh, wait... damn short term memory loss. Forgot what I was going to say next.
That's what the entire "war on drugs" is: Ineffective, useless policy based on absolutely nothing. The more I learn about our drug policy, the more infuriated I get. But that's a different story.
We can't hunt down bin Laden, but we can hunt down Willie Nelson.
What kind of a complete dork would actually think a government ad was more relevant than their peers? One without peers I assume, and at zero risk of ever coming into contact with drugs... much less friends willing to share them.
My god- I'd rather have a kid on drugs than one dumb enough to buy those ridiculous comercials.
Of course, the ads are not for the kids. They're for the parents. They display a concerned administration which is "doing something." The purpose is not so much to diminish drug use as to gain confidence -- and votes.
Check today's CNN.com website. They found another forum on which to encourage drug use: you tube
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/09/19/youtube.drug.policy.ap/inde…
The report Westat produced cost the government $42.7 million.
So the taxpayers get ripped off coming AND going. No wonder the War on Drugs and the Sick Old Noncombattants Who Use Them is so hard to stop -- too many people have too many opportunities to profit from it.
(Have you tried getting Federal money for this blog post?)
Grin, it even gets better of you compare the statistics between the so-liberal-that-everybody-should-be-stoned Netherlands with the US, the former has actually a lower number of drug users, drug addicts, drug crimes, or whatever....
Ditto what Skip Evans said. Sensible anti-drug messages do have the intended effect, but nonsense of the ONDCP sort only proves that the adults have absolutely no clue what they're talking about. All it takes is one kid who's already tried pot saying, "No way, dude, pot won't make you THAT stupid," and whatever illusion the ads managed to create is blown away by a more credible source.
Been there, done that, learned my lessons, learned that the adults haven't learned shit...
Waste of money. Not as big a waste as the D.A.R.E. program. Nothing is a bigger waste than that thing.
The government probably spent more money on that anti-drug campaign than has been lost due to "lost productivity" from smoking marijuana. That being said, I find it hard to believe that anti-drug ads materially increased drug use too. You can find a statistically significant effect with a large enough sample size even when the *magnitude* of that effect is small.