Above The Influence

Traditionally, anti-drug Public Service Announcements are hilariously inaccurate, probably because it's hard to convince kids smoking a joint will make them shoot their friend in the face or make their face fall off, since it's scientifically and anecdotally completely off-base. So what does an anti-drug campaign look like after Reefer Madness has been widely debunked?

Enter Above the Influence. You can check out some of their ads here on their website. I'd like to focus on two of my favorite anti-drug commercials, namely "Dog," "Not Again."

"Dog" features a girl named Lindsey whose dog tells her she's not the same anymore because she smokes pot. Leaving aside the fact that smoking pot is unlikely to get you into a conversation with your dog, giving you the ability to communicate with your pets is more likely to be a selling point than an effective scare tactic. The commercial also deploys circular logic - the dog's intervention is only appropriate if we already assume that marijuana is bad. The commercial tells us nothing about the effects of the drug; it only suggests that some of your friends might not want to hang out with you anymore if you do it. That seems like a contradiction with their earlier commercials about peer pressure - apparently giving into peer pressure is okay as long as your peers agree with your parents and teachers.

"Not Again" is so silly I probably wouldn't have mentioned it if I hadn't seen this article in Slate about how it's an exemplary anti-pot commercial. The premise is this: If you smoke pot, your girlfriend will leave you for a "straight-edge" alien. No, I'm not making this up. Apparently there are so few scientifically verifiable ill-effects of marijuana use that they have to resort to telling guys that their girlfriends will leave them for aliens if they smoke it. The glaring hole is that, gee, what if his girlfriend isn't a complete asshole who'll leave him for a little green man at the drop of a hat? What if he'd asked out Lindsey from "Dog" instead? Plus, this bites the same peer pressure contradiction highlighted above. If a girl left her boyfriend because he didn't smoke pot, Above the Influence would be quick to characterize him as valorous and her as, at the very least, fickle and addicted.

These commercials might not be so bad if it was clear that marijuana wrecked lives consistently. But if that were true, why couldn't Above the Influence make commercials about the actual health effects? I'm sure it would be easy to throw together a plausible commercial on memory loss ("God damn it, where are my keys?! I just had them!") or overeating ("woah, dude, is that entire pan of brownies gone already?!"). But those scenarios aren't scary enough, because they're just slightly more annoying versions of things that happen to pretty much everybody in daily life.

So, if Above the Influence is still a total failure, how do we make effective anti-pot commercials? I'm afraid I don't think we're likely to come up with anything soon. Most people don't base their decision to consume or abstain from illicit drugs on 30 second PSAs. The scariest thing about marijuana is the black spot a conviction can put on your criminal record - but even then, is a PSA about kids getting arrested going to do anything more than temporarily distract a few pot-heads from the giant box of cheese balls due to creeping paranoia. In other words, nothing slasher films and surprise dorm checks haven't already done. So maybe we should stop wasting time and money on these silly ads.