Here in the US, there’s a series of anti-marijuana ads that are being run on tv. They all end with saying “Marijuana, it’s more dangerous than you think.” There are three ads that I can recall:
Boy and girl are at party smoking. Girl (underage?) gets stoned and boy starts to undo top.
Family waiting for the results of pregnancy test. It’s positive. It turns out it’s the 15 year old daughter’s test.
Something about reckless driving. Cites a statistic that “of the drivers tested for drugs, 1/3 tested postitive for marijuana”.
The implication is that marijuana makes you lose total control. The thing that drives me crazy about this is that you could make the same exact commercials about alcohol! But they don’t say anything about that.
If I was rich, I’d make a commercial like this:
Girl at frat party chugging beers. Passes out. Commercial ends with guy carrying girl into his room. “Alcohol, it’s more dangerous than you think”
And the thing is, I bet the alcohol situations are much more common.
And when they had the statistics about reckless driving, it gives the impression that 1/3 of reckless drivers are on marijuana. But I think the police only drug test those who they think are DUI, not all reckless drivers. So for the people reckless driving and DUI, 1/3 were using marijuana. What was the other 2/3’s? They don’t say, but I would make a guess that it’s mostly alcohol.
So my real beef is that if “they” are really concerned about girls getting taken advantage of and reducing DUI, they’d probably be better focused on prohibiting alcohol–a readily available mood-altering substance.
Oh, and I’m not sure if it matters, but I don’t smoke marijuana or do drugs. So the commercials don’t bother me because I love marijuana or anything. I object to the irrational vilification of marijuana as some terrible substance. If it is truly as bad as they are suggesting, then they really need to get rid of the legal mood-altering substances first.
Never hear that do you? I agree, the ads are beyond rediculous in most cases. If the gov’t is really worried about pot smokers supporting terrorists; how about making it legal to grow your own?
No, no, it’s quite simple. Some people who have driven recklessly or been involved in a date rape also used marijuana. Ergo, reckless driving and date rape can only be prevented by locking up marijuna users. Since date rape and driving under the influence are completely legal, the only means we have of preventing these activities is stopping marijuana use.
The marijuana commercials that I’ve seen and that provoked so much comment went as follows:
Bunch of stoned, African-American adolescents in car are screwing around at a fast-food drive-thru. Their final time through, the guys urge the driver to drive away quickly, which he does- straight into the little girl riding her bike past.
Two giggly white boys are sitting in some kind of study/personal library, smoking up. One pulls out a gun and waves it around casually. Hey, is that loaded? Nope. See? bang Oops.
“Marijuana is more dangerous than you think.”
It’s been interesting, listening to the potheads get riled up seeing the commercials at school during the Channel One break (a TV news show for teens). These particular commercials are no more ridiculous than the “Drug money contributes to terrorism” and “Drug money supports horrible things” commercials.
I definitely agree that if they’re targeting teenage at-risk activities, it should be alcohol, instead. Underage drinking costs thousands more their lives than marijuana ever has or will.
Oh yeah Searching For Truth, I forgot about those other two. Again, two more situations that I feel happen a lot more because of alcohol instead of marijuana.
Perhaps the commercials would be relevant in some sense if people thought marijuana was like cigarettes. But I don’t think that’s the case. Certainly when I was a teen, my friends and I knew marijuana had a mood-altering affect even though we didn’t use it.
The commercials would also be better if it said that all mood-altering substances (alcohol, mj, muscle relaxants, etc) can cause you to lose some control. But I don’t suspect that’s the purpose of those commercials.
When I first say the one with the pregnancy test, my response was along the lines of “What? Smoking marijuana makes you pregnant? I always thought that was that sex thing…wait a minute! Smoking marijuana leads to getting laid? Where do I score some?”
I, too, am a non-toker. But marijuana prohibition is beyond stupidity, and recent advertising efforts have been really ludicrous.
why, considering the commercial, it can undoubtedly be because the parents, the little girl, and the people who thought these commercials would work, were smoking marijuana
The one about marijuana supporting terrorism was particular stupid. Almost all the Al Queda terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, and most of the money supporting it has been traced to … Saudi Arabians!
So are Saudi Arabians big pot exporters? Or is it that other stuff… oil!
I think that the reason we don’t see adds against alcohol is because the U.S. already tried to get rid of it, yeah prohibition, and all that led to was a rise in gang activities. also lets not forget that the government gets tax money from every ounce of liquor sold, and not a dime from an ounce of marijuana.
Unfortunately, no. If there were an easy way to do it, then it might become legalized sooner.
One of my best friends is a cop in Denver. He and most of the other cops he knows give a rats ass if someone smokes dope. Their main concern is the driving while high, but there are no ‘roadside’ tests that they can give that are conclusive enough to determine intoxication levels.
I guess there is a test where if you stand up straight and tilt your head back with your eyes open, looking up, they will look at the movement of your eyeball, supposedly it moves back and forth quickly if you have smoked pot within the past day or two. No help on a roadside.
IF there were a test, then my friend feels there would be more support from police departments to legalize it. Of all people, cops know that far more violent crimes are committed by drunks than potheads…they just want to keep the stoners from driving to 7-11 for a bag of Doritos.
One in three is very misleading. Or just a downright load of crap, depending on how you look at it.
According to the NHTSA, “Drugs other than alcohol (e.g., marijuana and cocaine) have been identified as factors in 18% of deaths among motor vehicle drivers. Other drugs are generally used in combination with alcohol.”
I scoured their site, but they don’t get any more specific than that. The part I bolded is telling, though. I haven’t seen the official report and apparently the NHTSA doesn’t make it available online, but I’ve seen other documents that reference the study and claim that 60-80% of drivers testing positive for other drugs were also drunk to some degree.
Then there’s the whole sticky business of testing positive for marijuana versus actually being stoned. It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when someone smoked pot just by testing them. The user could have smoked a day before the accident, perhaps even more.
From the evidence available, marijuana doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in accidents. Seethis link:
There have been several studies condemning marijuana’s role in driving, but their methodology is flawed. In addition to a couple of things mentioned by the researcher that you can see if you follow the previous link, you also have the fact that marijuana acts very differently on inexperienced users, rendering them incapable (and almost always unwilling) to drive. For experienced users it’s just more of a relaxed feeling. A few people who are smoking for the first time and are whacked out of their gourds would skew the results of a study.
Bolding mine, of course. So pot users only registered on the radar in one category out of who knows how many, and they were still below the legal limit for alcohol. The ONDCP can put that in their pipe and smoke it (making sure to first scrape out the crack residue left over from their last commercial idea brainstorming session).
