They try. Part of the problem is that the schools, the states, the police, the DEA, and just about everyone else have blown their credibility on the issue with years wolf crying. I was told everything from pot makes you insane to it's addictive to drug dealers force you to smoke it at gunpoint to get addicted to dealers like to lace it with rat poison for fun. And of course, everyone was told over and over that it's just as bad as coke or heroin. Then when I see my friends do it voluntarily and not go crazy, get addicted, or die from inhaling rat poison fumes, what am I supposed to think of everyone who told me pot was bad? The first thing that has to happen if you want an effective education and prevention strategy is to knock off the bullshit.His Divine Shadow wrote:Shouldn't they try something bit more pre-emptive? Like campaigns to get people to not do pot for example?
The second problem, the one that simply can't be overcome without instituting the death penalty for possession and random piss tests for everyone, is that no matter how bad something is for people and no matter how hard you educate them about it, a certain segment of the population is going to do it anyway so long as it's pleasureable. Cigarettes are a perfect example. From the 1960s on, there was a massive campaign to alert people to the dangers of smoking tobacco--the warnings on the packs, publc service announcements, banning cigarette commercials on TV, and a ton of health education in schools. The result? The rate of tobacco use in America plummeted. But by about the late 1980s, the rate of use stopped falling even as the anti-smoking campaign intensified. In my opinion, it hit a plateau--the people smoking now are, for the most part, the people who, for whatever reason, don't care about the health risks of smoking enough to not smoke. Every drug probably has this plateau somewhere, and marijuana's is going to be fairly high compared to drugs like cocaine and heroin, because its harmful effects are limited and people know it.
