Today, the drug czar unveiled the latest ad campaign: MethResources.gov. Certainly better than an alien stealing your girlfriend if you smoke pot, but I can’t help but believe that anti-drug advertising is counterproductive, and not just because it’s been badly/laughably done in the past.
Consider cigarettes. While public perception has changed considerably over the years regarding cigarettes, it seems to me that anti-cigarette advertising had very little to do with it. For most of my friends, this ubiquitous ad actually made them crave a cigarette. (Just as studies showed that the Media Campaign ads against marijuana tended to reinforce marijuana interest.)
The government should really get out of the propaganda business and focus on encouraging scientific inquiry.
The government should really get out of the propaganda business and focus on encouraging scientific inquiry.
But it’s a WAR! Don’t you know that all WARS absolutely must be conducted like HUGE bureaucratic money-making businesses with lots of team-work and personnel to make it look overly legitimate (even when it is not), and that includes a propaganda department where the less capable intelligent operatives can waste their time in offices playing with ideas and each others privates for more money than they deserve?
It’s hard to believe that people with a college degree today come out with such dribble and trash. Is that really what their Daddies paid for?
I think it’s singnificantly less a waist of money than the Above the Influence ads, with their focus on pot and stupid sketches unlikely to effect their target audience. At least meth has a stigma to reinforce; I’m eighteen and you’d be surprised how well the constant reinforcement of the anti-smoking message has effected my generation’s view on smoking. The money could still go to better things but I think it could be going to something worse as well.
“In a republic like ours, people often think that the proper response to an unjust law is to try to use the political process to change the law, but to obey and respect the law until it is changed. But if the law is itself clearly unjust, and the lawmaking process is not designed to quickly obliterate such unjust laws, then the law deserves no respect — break the law.”
– Henry David Thoreau
PROTEST TODAY, SEPT 2:
Diabetic Woman Dies After Being Evicted For Medical Pot Use
A diabetic double-amputee who was evicted from her apartment for smoking medical marijuana has died. Protest Marilyn Holsten’s mistreatment: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2009 from 12-6pm at the Anavets Senior Citizens Housing Society building at 951 8th Ave E, Vancouver.
Diabetic Woman Dies After Being Evicted For Medical Pot Use
A diabetic double-amputee who was evicted from her apartment for smoking medical marijuana has died. Protest Marilyn Holsten’s mistreatment: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2009 from 12-6pm at the Anavets Senior Citizens Housing Society building at 951 8th Ave E, Vancouver.
Protest Aims to Force out ‘Cruel’ Housing-Group Head
Blind, Diabetic, Double-Amputee Dies After Being Evicted
Papa, Anthony Huffington Post 01 Sep 2009
Smoke Medical Cannabis, Get Evicted
How would you like to be evicted for doing something completely legal, just because someone else thought it was unsavoury?
Patient Continue Legal Fight for Medical Marijuana By Jason Tomassini
CN Source: Montgomery Gazette September 02, 2009 Maryland
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to
and you have the exact measure of the injustice
and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
~ Frederick Douglass
So the government still thinks that teens, I assume that’s their target market, still watch commercials? I know that I rarely see commercials at all anymore since my tv is recorded and just about all commercials are automatically skipped.
Besides the PROMOTION or marijuana problems these ads have had in the past, and the utter waste of those monies were, what does the government hope to gain from a phantom, non-commercial watching teen segment of the population? Maybe getting their ads posted on youtube to make fun of I guess…
If you think about it, the government has every incentive to continue warfare, and this propaganda campaign probably isn’t aimed at people on the fence, but more so at current drug warriors who may need to be reminded that drug users are criminals and drug peddlers are dangerous scum… unless, of course, they distribute alcohol. Then it’s just good ole fashioned fun.
War, whether domestic or foreign, allows government to:
1) increase it’s size with various departments that allow new legislation to be pushed through at the behest of these departments.
2) increase profits as they get cheap labor from prison camps and a consistent flow of funds from fines.
3) increase the level of public acceptance at various government tactics. You can’t go overnight from being allowed to snort lines or smoke pot to allowing government agents to break down doors the next day. However, convincing the public that without X legislation or without the government being allowed to do Y, a disaster would be imminent allows the government to invade your private life and do it with the public’s okay. Even the strongest government in the world, the US federal government, prefers to have public approval before undertaking a task.
Hey I think your post is great!I found it on Bing. Keep up the good work.