These lying fools.The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign has made great strides in its efforts to alert teens and parents about the dangers and harms of drug use, including marijuana. There is concern that funding reductions in recent years are starting to produce erosion in the perception of harm of marijuana use among young teens. Indeed, the MTF survey shows that among 8th graders, the perceived harm in smoking marijuana regularly which had been rising sharply in recent years, has decreased (from 76.2% to 73.9%).
"The decline in overall drug use is a success for the Media Campaign," said Robert W. Denniston, Director of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. "But we are worried about the effects that funding cuts will have on our ability to maintain the momentum we have built up over the years in reducing drug use among the nation's young people."
As we reported here a few weeks ago, Congress has increasingly cut the Drug Czar's advertising budget for the past few years because the only large-scale scientific studies that have looked into the Media Campaign have found it to be a miserable failure. If Johnny Walters wants a bigger allowance from Congress, he'd better start bringing home better report cards.
1 comment:
And that crying will get louder as an unusual dynamic begins to unfold:
It has been the stated desire of the NeoConservatives - at least among their ideological circle - that the only way to enact the (supposedly) 'conservative agenda' is to (as so eloquently explained by Grover Norquist) 'shrink government so small it can be drowned in the bath-tub.'
The conflict this has with Federally funding the War on Some Drugs becomes immediately obvious. What's not so obvious are the strains this is placing on an already fractured coalition of (supposed) 'conservatives'. The faction of control-freak killjoys comprised of, to paraphrase the late William S. Burroghs "decent church-goin' people, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces" is at odds with the factions of philosophical libertarians and cold-eyed bean counters. The way the economy is going, the bean counters are gaining the upper hand, while the faux moralist control-freaks are becoming ever more marginalized as the economic rubber meets the road with a loud screech. They know they've been marginalized, and don't like it one bit, but are realizing that they are, as they have always been, Machiavellian 'auxiliaries to be used ina political fight and discarded soon after as being too radical and dangerous to the DrugWar 'realists' who see this as a gravy train and nothing more. It from the control freak quarter we hear the loudest shrieking.
So...how will Ol' Johnny Pee walk the tightrope between the two groups? The control-freaks want the DrugWar ("No surrender to the druggies!" they shriek) to continue on (faux) moral grounds, but the economy just can't take the strain anymore, and the bean counters know it. Ideology is clashing with reality.
Post a Comment