The study appears online and in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
The researchers surveyed 8,117 children from 1999 to 2001 and followed up with many of them over the next several years. The children were nine to18 years old when they were first recruited for the study, the same ages as the group targeted by the campaign’s TV ads.
Ninety-four percent of the kids reported seeing two to three of the anti-drug ads per week. But seeing the ads didn’t reduce the likelihood that the children used marijuana. And it appeared that the ads possibly raised the risk that kids would be willing to try marijuana. …
“Our basic hypothesis is that the more kids saw these ads, the more they came to believe that lots of other kids were using marijuana,” Hornik said. “And the more they came to believe that other kids were using marijuana, the more they became more interested in using it themselves.”
A spokesperson for the Feds said that their commercials are much, much better now than they were back in 2001.
Logically I shouldn’t care whether pot use numbers go up or down, but honestly, the more people smoke pot, the more pleased I feel. Perhaps I’m hoping that at some point anti-drug policies will become so obviously absurd that it will actually become politically viable to end the drug war. But it’s a stupid hope; we’ve had admitted past drug users in the White House time after time, and it doesn’t cause anyone to question our drug policies.
Maybe I just hate the drug war so much that I’m pleased by any evidence of its failure.
Maybe I just like the thought that somewhere out there, some people are happily stoned.
It’s hard for me to imagine how a sane drug policy could become politically viable, without a major sea change in both parties. Maybe it could happen first in one of the eastern liberal states, or one of the western libertarian states, and spread from there.
Curtsy: Marriagedebate.
i always enjoy it when anti-drug efforts fail, almost as much as watching abstinence-only education programs fail. maybe there is hope in the world.
One of the good things about California’s Prop. 5 is that it changes possession of less than an ounce of pot from a misdemeanor to an infraction.
I can’t say I’m wild about the rest of the initiative, though. It seems like a good idea that’s poorly thought out.
Well, the much touted DARE program has a similar effect so this isn’t much of a surprise.
There is no doubt that drug programs, in my small-town Midwest school where drugs were not much of an issue, were titillating to me and raised my interest in what drugs were all about.
Back in the day, my college had an article in the student handbook every year. It was information compiled from medical textbooks about pretty much any drug you’re likely to run across, legal or otherwise. It noted dosage, effects, side effects, and long term side effects (I don’t recall if it noted interactions). Every now and then someone would get a bee in their bonnet about how it was “encouraging” drug use. I always thought this was silly, because the actual truth about drug effects convinced me that I didn’t want to take most of them; the scare propaganda made me want to take them just to spite the nagging liars. I also figure the dosage entry probably helped prevent accidental overdosed among newbies experimenting with the stuff.
Kit,
That’s a brilliant idea — I wish we had a government that mandated colleges dispense medically accurate information about drugs to students as a condition of getting federal funding. I can’t say that I cheer either drug use or sex among 9-17 year olds, but committing to telling minors the truth about what we prefer they’d not do is a much better strategy just on a deontological basis, regardless of its practical outcome.
Maybe it could happen first in one of the eastern liberal states, or one of the western libertarian states, and spread from there.
The trouble with the Raich decision is that it doesn’t permit for the federalism Amp suggests. Our drug policy is run by the federal government, and federal agents can enforce the drug laws even if local cops and prosecutors won’t. I suspect it will take a slightly libertarian-minded Republican president to shift us toward a sane drug policy — sort of a “only Nixon could go to China, only Clinton could reform welfare” thing.
Obama has been reviled just for suggesting that perhaps mandatory minimum sentences for possession are unwise and that many drug dealers would take up other occupations if there were good jobs in their communities. There’s no way he can do anything about drug policy in his first term, though it might work for his second term. By 2016, the voting population will be made up primarily of people who have tried drugs, or at least respect some people who admit they did, and much of the generation that put any credence whatsoever into Marijuana Madness will have passed on to their reward.
Well, there is The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens & Marijuana—including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol. I read it years ago and it was really illuminating.
http://www.amazon.com/Consumers-Narcotics-Stimulants-Depressants-Hallucinogens/dp/0316107174
and
http://www.hoboes.com/Politics/Prohibition/Notes/Licit/
There are well-documented health risks for using pot, especially for adolescent males. But I don’t think any country that raises money from alcohol sales should be objecting to legalisation!