Friday, June 30, 2006

Obsess Much?

Citizens against Government Waste released a report claiming that the Drug Czar's "obsession" with marijuana has led to failure of addressing "harder drugs". The report can be read here in PDF.
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The White House Office of National Drug Policy (ONDCP) has wasted billions of taxpayers' dollars since its formation in 1988 on ineffective and counter-productive policies that fail to meet the agency's core objectives, according to a report released this week by the non-partisan Washington, DC think-tank Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW).

"The federal government and the ONDCP have chosen to ignore evidence suggesting that the methods being used in the war on drugs are not effective," the report says. "[T]he federal government has become so obsessed with marijuana use that it is spending money unwisely.

"The government has thrown more than $1 billion at a campaign that has only succeeded in increasing the number of teenage marijuana users," the report states, noting that reviews of the media campaign have found that it often encourages - rather than discourages - cannabis use among viewers.

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The ONDCP is not as concerned with reducing the few possible harms associated with marijuana but are obsessed with altering the opinion of youth and American's in general that marijuana is in fact a useful medicine or at least a safer alternative for enjoyable recreation.

We know they are lying and find most of their TV ads more amusing than anything else. The ONDCP commercials never contain any facts or realistic scenarios, because there aren't any that really support their claims. So they make up ads about teenage girls that smoke pot and become pregnant, or another teenager that apparently made a hat out of ground beef after smoking a joint (he may have some other issues aside from marijuana use that should be looked into...). The ground beef ad is probably the best I've seen because it ends in the worst possible effect of marijuana use...ARREST.

Citizens Against Government Waste issued a similar critique of the ONDCP last year, calling the agency a "federal wasteland" that fails to show objective results.

The ONDCP: Not as useful as you thought.

5 comments:

thehim said...

Making a hat out of ground beef? That's a real commercial? Is that on YouTube? I need to see that.

Micah Daigle said...

It's a print ad, which can be found here:

http://www.humans.com/pages/images/potfacts.jpg

Anonymous said...

To say the ONDCP isn't useful is not entirely correct: it is useful...in acting as a unregistered lobbying group whose only real purpose is to protect and further the economic interests of DrugWarriors. In this capacity, it has served flawlessly, and will no doubt continue to do so, at least until the US is forced into further resource allocations needed to prosecute the Iraq War.

Chuck said...

Psst... you need to fix your link on the words "reviews of the media campaign". The URL in that link leads to a school website that requires a username and password. But that address is just redirecting to the real article. (Note that the URL has the word "redir" in it, followed by a new URL.) The website you're trying to link to is "http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=6898".

But good article! This is all a lot of fun to read.

Chuck said...

Sorry, I was distracted by that link. I have to say: the part about arrest is a great point! According to the ONDCP itself, the worst effect of marijuana is the ONDCP! Now if only everyone could stop smoking, we would finally be able to rid the world of that great scourge upon humanity, the ONDCP.