Smoking Pot Crushed Me Bones!
Sorry if this seems a little dated to you because you’ve seen them, but they’re new to me. Holy Christ, the Office of National Drug Control Policy has some new anti-drug ads out…And they’re hilarious!!! Wow, these are so terribly bizarre that they’re borderline self-parody. Remember those old ads where a little girl got run over by pot-smoking teens at a fast-food drive thru? Or the one where two kids got high, and then one accidentally shot the other with a shotgun? Or that whole (Fill in the Blank) is My Anti-Drug campaign? Sure you do, lazy comics have been rehashing those bits for years now.
Well, those blatant scare tactics are nothing compared to the ads that are running now. You thought pot was dangerous when all it did was make you run over little kids? Look at what they’ve found out marijuana can do now:
“Me bones! The marijuana stole me bones! Now I’ll never make the cheerleading squad!”
That’s an actual screenshot of the new ads that are running. In this ad, a girl laments to an off-screen interviewer that, since her friend started smoking pot, all she does is lie around. Get it? They’ve taken the figurative idea of pot making you lazy, and turned it into a visual crackerjack! Here’s another picture of it:
“Her bones! Where have they gone? Pot stole them and now I have to bring her sodas because she can’t go to the fridge!”
Good Lord, these aren’t just horribly manipulative, they’re downright crazy. But the White House couldn’t do them all on its own. They hired the advertising agency of Foote, Cone & Belding to do it for them. The name, or “tag,” for these ads is “Above the Influence,” which Foote, Cone & Belding actually believes will steer teens away from drugs and alcohol and sex. Just listen to FCB’s Executive Vice President Kim Corrigan, whose optimism regarding these ads is, frankly, fucking ridiculous:
“We had an opportunity to make the whole concept of “anti-drug” more aspirational and to figure out a way of taking the notion of drug use and putting it in the context of something teens could find motivating,” said Kim Corrigan, FCB’s evp and worldwide account director. “This brand platform will stick with [teens] . . . because it is the kind of message that is more readily internalized when they are confronted with the choice of to smoke pot or not. It is more peer to peer and it feels more authentic.”
There you have it: advertising doubletalk from a woman who probably lives in a three story loft in Tribeca from all the money she’s previously made by coming up with beer ads that feature horses farting in women’s faces or some such. And if Ms. Corrigan’s statement isn’t enough to convince you the nation is this close to turning the corner on the war on drugs, well, then I just don’t know what to tell you. Here’s some more screenshots of the ads. This one comes from a spot affectionately titled “Smushed.”
“I got really drunk at a party, had sex with some guy, and before I knew it, I had tape on my face. Plus, I shrunk.”
And here’s another one:
“It’s hard to put on my makeup so I can look pretty for boys now.”
By the way, this advertising campaign cost 125 million dollars. I wonder how much cocaine that would buy for an ad exec. A lot, I would guess. And, if you’re curious about the origin of the ads, you can read this article.
You can see the rest of the ads on their official website, for which I have provided this handy link.
Above The Influence
Apparently, these ads starting running in November, but on shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Charmed, so you can guess why I’ve never seen them. It was on the Colbert Report last night, which is where I caught it.
