A recent anti-marijuana television commercial shows a teenage girl grabbing some munchies out of the fridge as a friend calls out her name. She turns around with a very confused look on her face. Now the viewer is thinking, this young girl must be hopelessly stoned. She does have a problem. She doesn't even recognize her own friends. Then the camera pans to the friend and it turns out that the friend is actually her dog. "Lindsay, I wish you wouldn't smoke weed. You're not the same when you smoke," it says.
The first time I saw this ad, I wasn't even sure what the dog said because I was too busy focusing on that fact the dog was speaking to her. What is the message here? Smoke weed and you can talk to animals? I guess it is touching that man's best friend is pleading with her for a change but when doesn't a dog find humans a bit weird? We're always going places to do work, eating with utensils and we refuse to catch Frisbees in our mouth. I also like that the dog uses the term "weed" - it shows that he is hip to the jive of today - but honestly, how many 10-year-olds innocently approached their parents and asked how they could start smoking weed so they could talk to their pets? The problem here is that while trying to educate our young ones about the perils they will face in the real world, such as drugs, its done in an ineffective way.
The chief problem with anti-drug advertisements is that they depend too much on scare tactics to get their message across. They hammer home the alleged end result of using these substances without supplying the logic to reach the conclusions. "Smoke pot and you'll be lazy." "Smoke pot and you'll be anti-social." But if a kid sees this message, and still decides to experiment, and doesn't find these warnings to be applicable, as sometimes is the case, then he or she may disregard the underlying message of the ad, which is in fact true.
We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture where singers smoke pot in their videos and other personalities across the board openly admit to using the substances and giving it appeal. If parents - who are naturally not cool - instruct children to just say no to drugs but then celebrities - who get all the glamour - are shown using the substances, who do you think is going to win out? "Say no because my parents say so," or "smoke weed, have what appears to be fun and party with scantily clad women?"
Now I'm not blaming the media or celebrities, they are both ural parts of society, It's just that in all anti-drug attempts I've come across, they always seem to miss the point a little bit and leave me more confused than anything. They have one ad where a friend is giving a testimonial about pot's influence on her former friend. On the verge of tears and in an obvious fit of misery she explains, "Jody started smoking pot and she started spending so much time by herself. She started staying home all the time and wouldn't hang out with us anymore." This is very touching and I'm sure some can relate to parts of it but come on. Nobody gets into smoking pot by lighting, up by themselves at their parents house. Maybe they were just bad friends. Maybe she never wanted to hang out with them in the first place and it took a few tokes for her to just say, in softer terms, screw it. That's what authority figures say pot does. It just makes you start saying 'screw it' to showers, haircuts, parents and condoms. Maybe she now had new friends who weren't afraid to smoke a little cheeba with her once in a while and they weren't constantly nagging her in a half-crying voice to come hang out.
That is why the anti-drug campaigns are always a little bit off. "Just say no" doesn't work, but the hard part about advocating a different course of action is by doing so you are, to a certain extent, advocating the use of substances. This issue pertains to alcohol education too. CNN.com recently ran an article about Stanton Peele, the author of "Addiction-Proof Your Child." His perspective is that "any program that tells kids flatly not to drink creates temptation." It is a natural phenomenon people want what they can't have.
The Libertarian Party takes the issue even further. They are pushing for the end to all drug prohibition. They say that it does more harm than good and is the cause of a lot of unneeded violence. Just like all other pro-drug voices, they use the example of alcohol prohibition and how there was a significantly elevated crime rate during that time. They say another facet of the problem is since drugs are illegal, the cost is inflated and this causes users to have to commit crimes in order to support their habits. This not only creates danger for citizens but means that a significant amount of police resources are devoted to alleviating the problem. While they represent an extreme and radical end of the spectrum, they do give food for thought.
I really don't know what the overall solution is but what's currently being done is not working. Look around. Drinking and smoking are everywhere and nothing that has been done to attempt to curb the use of these vices has worked with much effectiveness. All these ads talk about being "above the influence," but that implies a general avoidance of the subject. Campaigns should talk about the influence, discuss the influence and reach a compromise regarding the influence that doesn't involve taking advice from animals.
Staff columnist Alex Schaefer is a 7th-semester accounting major. He can be reached at Alexander.Schaefer@UConn.edu.
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