Actually, what bothers me the most is the commercial that traces a joint back to a murder of a family of 20 in Columbia.
“This is the shovel that got shoved up the ass of the advertising executive because of the commercial that he made which angered Lord Ashtar when he was trying to watch Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and enjoy the images of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Eliza Dushku.”
Bastards.
Yet another reason to grow your own.
I like the commercial where they’re talking about marijuana use leading to reckless driving, and their statistic is that a certain percentage of people who were pulled over for reckless driving and given a drug test tested positive for marijuana. Look, I hate to be anal about this, but not all people who are pulled over for reckless driving are tested for drugs!!! If you’re obviously drunk, they’re probably not going to bother testing you for drugs. If you’re arguing with your significant other on the cell phone while driving, they’re probably not going to bother testing you for drugs. I need to get some more statistics on this, but my point basically is that they’re implying that a certain percentage of all reckless drivers are on marijuana, and it isn’t fucking true. And that shit makes me mad.
Actually, the quote taken directly from a radio ad I heard about an hour ago (and I made a big stink)…
“More than one third of all drivers who have tested positive for drugs have tested positive for marijuana”.
The exact comment I made was: “Wow…it’s a lot safer to drive stoned than I thought.”
Then there was the ad where some guy is at a drive through and forgets he doesn’t have any money (they must have had some really good shit). So he slams on the accelerator and hits some poor kid on a bike. Uh…excuse me? Smoking pot breeds paranoia. That guy is much more likely to look both ways before cautiously inching out of the drive through lane, slamming on the brakes twice for tricks of his peripheral vision than he is to slam on the accelerator.
Don’t get me wrong…I firmly believe that smoking pot impairs judgement while driving. However, I also truthfully feel that the only valid argument for keeping pot illegal is the lack of an adequate road-side testing method to enforce a “driving while stoned” law.
I do remember an ad from about a decade ago that I thought was very effective. There were two guys in their late 20’s sitting in the living room smoking a joint. In walks one of the guys’ mom and proclaims something like, “Why don’t you quit smoking that stuff and go out and get a job?”
“I got an interview tomorrow.” is about what the son states. Then, his mother leaves the house. He then proclaims to his friend, “I just don’t get it…I’ve been smoking pot for ten years and nothing has changed!”
The frame freezes, and the caption comes up: “Nothing will change”.
Obviously, the commercial is trying to depict a pot smoker as a near-30 year old who has done nothing to further his place in the world quite possibly because of his pot addiction.
That is the only anti-pot ad that I have ever seen that even rings a shred of truth. Why do we fill our kids full of lies to try to prevent delinquant behavior when we could be telling them a truth that they won’t question when it actually comes time to make a choice?
“Smoking pot will kill you.” is a lie when compared to alcohol statistics.
“Smoking pot may stagnate your life” is a truth with which people can associate.
By teaching our young the former, they soon learn that they have been lied to. Then they think that, since pot didn’t kill them, they can do other drugs and they’ll be just fine as well.
Trust me…I’ve been there. Thank God I felt the negative effects that LSD and Methamphetamine were doing to me before I did to much damage to myself. I firmly believe that if there was better education about drug use prevalent when I was a youngster, I would have avoided the shit altogether. It wasn’t the lack of information that got me…it was the lying.