children and boomerang 
According to an article published in the latest issue of Alcohol and Drugs Findings
, the largest anti-drug campaign led by the U.S. government was not only totally useless when the youth away from drugs, but had the opposite effect they were trying their promoters. It was in 1998 when the U.S. Congress passed with the support of the two major parties the
National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign , an ambitious initiative to reduce youth consumption of drugs.
The cost of the campaign was over one billion dollars, and involved all the major TV networks, for every advertising space purchased by the ONDCP (Office federal U.S. drug) promised to donate an equivalent time in propaganda Free. The campaign received harsh criticism ranging from the illegal use of federal funds to the misleading propaganda through the creation of dubious links between drugs and terrorism, but the worst was yet to come.
When the NIDA began evaluating the results of the campaign in 2002, experts came from his astonishment. The more the kids remembered the campaign, the more favorable was their attitude towards consumption and felt less able to resist any offers to try cannabis. Another significant rebound effect was that, on being presented cannabis as something widespread among their peers, children were taken of the main message ("do not take drugs) and stayed with the secondary message (" everybody does it " .)
Thereafter, some changes were applied (a greater emphasis harms of cannabis in the raising of the age of the target), but the results were identical. The disappointing conclusion was that the attitude of youth towards cannabis was independent of their exposure to this very expensive campaign: 1,000 million dollars thrown away. ONDCP's attempts to extract some positive outcome of the campaign by manipulating the data did not convince the U.S. Congress, who preferred to rely on the assessment of NIDA.
No wonder, then, the harsh opinion of the NGO Citizens Against Wasteful Government (of a more than conservative), in May 2005 described the campaign as one of the most serious incidents of waste of public resources devoted grueling epithets such that:
"ONDCP's program has been nothing but a smokescreen to disguise educational project, but actually created for torpedo state marijuana initiatives (...) violated campaign propaganda federal laws did not reduce drug use among youth and has not produced any significant results " inevitable questions: Are the campaigns FAD and the National Drug Plan is subject to some kind of evaluation? Are we wasting resources that could be devoted to things most useful? Will they have something to do English anti-drug campaigns with increasing youth consumption in our country? We fear that any government official will answer these questions.
- Full text article (*. pdf)
Boomerang ads - U.S. government? S Biggest Ever Attempt to use the half to turn U.S. youth away from drugs - Related Items:
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