Study: Anti-Drug Ads Haven’t Worked
Despite investing $1 billion in a massive anti-drug campaign, a controversial new study suggests that the push has failed to help the United States win the war on drugs.A congressionally mandated study released today concluded that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign launched in the late 1990s to encourage young people to stay away from drugs “is unlikely to have had favorable effects on youths.”
In fact, the study’s authors assert that anti-drug ads may have unwittingly delivered the message that other kids were doing drugs, inadvertently slowing measured progress that was being made to curb marijuana use among teenagers.
The study’s authors called the findings, published in the December edition of the American Journal of Public Health, “particularly worrisome because they were unexpected.”
Today, study author and professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, Robert Hornik, told ABCNews.com that the reported decline in marijuana use “could be due to lots of influences, not just the campaign.” He said he was expecting to conclude that the anti-drug campaign had positive effects, “but we couldn’t find ‘em.”
“Despite extensive funding, governmental agency support, the employment of professional advertising and public relations firms, and consultation with subject-matter experts, the evidence from the evaluation suggests that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign had no favorable effects on youths’ behavior and that it may even have had an unintended and undesirable effect on drug cognitions and use,” the report said.
In other words, teens who specifically said they had a lot of exposure to the campaign messages were no less likely to stay away from marijuana than those who did not.
There is also a small amount of evidence that indicates the anti-drug campaign may have had the opposite effect for some teens. In one part of the analysis, teens who recalled seeing 12 or more anti-drug messages per month were actually more likely to start using marijuana than those who had seen fewer anti-drug messages per month.
The Drug Czar is pushing back against this finding by noting the teen use of marijuana has declined in the years during this campaign. So, despite these findings showing that it wasn’t the ads that made kids less likely to smoke weed, he’s going to accept the correlation that the ads did help, just because they happened at the same time.
So, then, it makes you wonder about the other major “ad campaign” of the late 90s and 2000s – the push for medical use of marijuana, beginning in 1996 in California and spreading to eleven other states (twelve this November). We’ve actually got research that shows the rates of teen marijuana use, while declining in the 38 non-medical states, declined faster in the 12 medical states.
If we’re going to play the correlation game, why not say that it was medical marijuana, not reefer madness ads, that made kids less likely to use pot? That seems to jibe better with the research shown here.
