Report Finding Anti-Marijuana Ads Backfire Buried by White House, Group Alleges
WASHINGTON D.C. — On the heels of a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessment questioning the effectiveness of the White House-sponsored anti-marijuana advertising campaign, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) this week finally released an evaluation of the ad campaign that was kept under wraps for a year and a half. The report finds that the anti-marijuana campaign has not only failed to reduce teen marijuana use, but it actually increased marijuana use among certain adolescents.
Officials of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), who have been attempting to obtain a copy of the Westat report since early 2005 when the report was first expected to be released, charged that the ONDCP buried the report until now because it did not want the results to be made public, and that ONDCP is finally allowing NIDA to release it only because the GAO has uncovered the negative results of the evaluation.
The report – which was commissioned by NIDA and performed by Westat, a private research firm – was made available to GAO investigators and served, in part, as the basis of the GAO report released on August 25. According to the GAO, “the only significant effect indicated in Westat’s analysis of the relationship between campaign exposure and self-reported drug use” was an increase in first-time marijuana use by 12½- to 13-year-olds and girls. Responding to Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP’s) claim that failure to continue the media campaign would be “raising the white flag to those who favor drug legalization,” the GAO authors wrote, “In our view, on the other hand, continuation of programs that have been demonstrated not to work diverts scarce resources from programs that may be more effective.”
“Both the GAO and Westat reports confirm that these anti-marijuana ads are a monumental waste of taxpayer dollars,” said Aaron Houston, director of government relations for MPP in Washington, D.C. “The fact that they’ve known these ads backfire and still allowed the program to continue – while hiding this report from the Congress and the public – makes the White House complicit in higher rates of drug use by children.”
A copy of the just-released Westat report is available at http://www.nida.nih.gov/DESPR/Westat/.
With more than 20,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. MPP believes that the best way to minimize the harm associated with marijuana is to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. For more information, please visit http://MarijuanaPolicy.org. #### |
