THIS is Your Ad Budget on Drugs

[SmokeWeed]

The federal government has spent about $1.2 billion since 1998 on scores of television, print and radio ads designed to discourage drug use among youth. President Bush has requested another $120 million for next year.

But not only do these admonishments not work, they are -- like so many ham-handed government interventions -- counterproductive.

Based on an independent evaluation of the campaign by Westat Inc., the Government Accountability Office on Friday recommended cutting back funding for the effort. Westat found the ads had no "significant favorable effects" in deterring children from trying marijuana or in getting them to stop. In fact, it found that more 12 1/2- to 13-year-old boys and girls were trying the drug after seeing the ads.

This should hardly be a surprise. One recent TV ad, for example, shows a nurse standing over a boy who appears to have his fist stuck in his mouth. The boy mumbles something, and the nurse translates: "Yesterday my friends told me to smoke some pot and I did. Then today they said I should try and fit my fist into my mouth. It fits but I can't get it out."

Wow. Deep stuff. Can we roll that back to see how many nanograms cause impairment?

Another ad in the campaign famously showed an egg frying in a pan, warning, "This is your brain on drugs." Far from recoiling in horror, the same puckish American sense of humor that caused our forebears to adopt the disparaging Redcoat anthem "Yankee Doodle" as their own marching song has led Americans to create T-shirts warning "This is your brain on podcasts," "This is your brain on political correctness," etc.

These "public service ads" generally run at a lower cost -- or free, on a "time available" basis -- under the rationale that they, well ... "serve the public." Such an explanation makes it sound as though
commercial stations can run them or not, as they please. In fact, so long as the federal government has the authority to renew a station's license -- or seize this multimillion-dollar asset and hand it to someone else -- station managers know the time they dedicate to such "public service" ads and programming is being added up, and that any shortfall can be held against them.

If the ads or programming in question simply familiarize viewers with voting locations, or flood warnings, that's fine. But the reason America has a free press is that the founders realized the public would be best "served" with a vigorous public debate on issues of the day.

"Public service," on the other hand, is increasingly a euphemism for "propaganda" -- only the official government line need be presented.

Americans -- even America's kids -- show an admirable skepticism toward such simple-minded "orders from on high."

Let's not waste any more on this folly.

Newshawk: *********** - 420 Magazine
Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal (NV)
Pubdate: Tue, 29 Aug 2006
Copyright: 2006 Las Vegas Review-Journal
Contact: letters@reviewjournal.com
Website: reviewjournal.com

[greendreem420]

the gov't needs to look at it like a company would look at an ad campaign. Profit or loss? the later.

[merickson]

I think we should take all the money from the enforcement budget and spend it on the goverment's fine educational programs.

[SmokeWeed]

Want to turn our economy around? legalize weed, free ALL prisoners (@$30k upkeep per prisoner per yr) being held for possession of marijuana, tax MJ @ $100.00 per ounce (that means 250-300 per ounce total) would keep it at current prices more or less, GROW HEMP!!!
Hemp is going to be the moniest making crop of the future when the feds can see the daylight..........

[trpnat420]

The 8,091 marijuana plants, with a street value of over 16 million dollars

Law enforcement officials estimate the marijuana would have eventually been worth about $27 million if it would have been harvested and sold on the street. officers spent the afternoon sending the plants through a chipper and bundling them in burlap sacks to be burned.
What a waste!!!!!

If they would legalize it they could have had all them millions they incinerated.

Always Remember, Go Forward, Never Straight!!



"Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis."