DID THEY WORK?
Anti-Marijuana Ads
By Chynna Pearson
Remember all those antimarijuana ads? What did they accomplish, if anything? Because let's be honest, even Nancy Regan can admit the winner of the War on Drugs was drugs. I know way too many stoners who wear D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) shirts ironically and who had previously signed the oath never to touch the stuff. For me and most of my friends, D.A.R.E didn’t do its job but, it also didn’t make us more curious. It simply did not work for us and many others. Just in case these ads aren’t coming back to you, let’s mention some of the more known ones. Some ads have been recently turned into memes, like the one where a girl is deflated on the couch (I’ve seen people say, “I want what she was smoking,” in reference to her). Another was parodied on Family Guy, a man is too concerned with smoking to take care of his dog and it makes the dog sad. But, one of the most memorable ones is the eggs in a frying pan with a voice over saying,
“THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS.” There are many more, but just for reminders sake, those are all I will describe. Additionally, anti-drug ads used to be in newspapers and on posters in schools, they were not only in the form of commercials. Let’s go back to the time when anti-drug ads would run at all times of the day, the 80s’, 90s’, and early 2000s’. (Interestingly enough, there are even some anti-drug/marijuana ads that are still running in conservatice areas and being produced today!) When the War on Drugs started, “Just say no,” was the most popular saying to combat drug use.
However, the “Just say no'' campaign was created around the time of the Crack Epidemic of the 1980s, it had little to do with other drugs as that was the main focus at that time. According to History.com, “In 1985, the proportion of Americans who saw drug abuse as the nation’s “number one problem,” was between 2 percent and 6 percent. In 1989, that number jumped to 64 percent.”
As time progressed and public concern for drugs increased, all drugs were encompassed in “Just say no.” That is when D.A.R.E. was introduced to about 75% of American schools in the early 80s and continues today (although it is not in as many schools today and the ones that do have an adjusted “hands-on” approach). As of 2001, the Surgeon General, Dr. David Satcher, has categorized D.A.R.E as an “ineffective primary prevention program.” When looking into this further, The New York Times reported that these ads “at best had no effect on drug use, research shows. At worst, exposure to the campaign might have actually increased the likelihood of adolescent marijuana use.'' A study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine (NCBI), shows that in thousands of adolescents surveyed from 1999 to 2004, that there was no change in the prevalence of marijuana use for those who did and those who didn’t get exposed to anti-marijuana campaigns. It did not even correlate with the rising percentage of people who agreed with anti-marijuana ads. Some of the adolescents studied reported to have seen weekly ads, even then, they continued to or went to try marijuana. thechronicmagazine.com
FEBRUARY 2022
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