I agree that the artwork and music are perfect. The animation is low key in a way that makes it stylish and stand out from past ads, and the music is catchy and up-beat (a welcome change from most anti-drug spots). My problem here is with how they are going about the subject. When it comes to pot, there are three categories of people: Those who will never try it, those who will use it for years and years without care for the kind of legal or moral ramifications that may come about, and those who might be swayed in either direction. The first type doesn’t matter, since they are too straight laced and law abiding to ever stray. The second are kids who will smoke at lunchtime in high school, attending class glassy eyed, with no care for the risk that they could be caught. This type is not going to stop doing something just because a government funded ad told them to.

So our third type (part time or would be smokers) is the target market. Such kids tend to start because they already know people who smoke. They don’t grow or buy in bulk, so it stands to reason that their friends smoke. This renders the ad where the smoker comes off as boring a mute point. Sure, I had friends who smoked and others who didn’t, but I’ve never lost a friendship, or known someone who did, over pot. Users, even if they only do it occasionally, are friends with people at least hip to the scene. Maybe not all of your friends smoke, but they probably at least drink. Typically speaking, the straight edge crowd is a bit separate from the party crowd.

The other ad shows our user saying something like “next week is better for me” as an excuse for why he doesn’t quit right now. True, no user of any drug wants to become addicted, but pot is just about as non-addictive as video games. Some quick research on Google shows that the only thing that makes users come back to it again and again is that it is fun. Everyone I know stopped using when they started looking for jobs, or when their friends stopped (or moved away). The fact is, the vast majority could stop in one day if they had to, and again the kids they are going after probably don’t smoke every day.

So I like that the anti-pot ads are moving in a somewhat more realistic direction, but they still seem to missing something. This is the same problem they’ve been having with these campaigns since the beginning. As it stands now, the only way to motivate people to never try pot is to lie to them about it and hope they never find out. This is more likely to just postpone the inevitable experimentation, and could come back to haunt them by making these kids more likely to reject government on any subject. In the end, this problem seems to answer it’s own question: Why is it so hard to convince kids to not try pot? Because there aren’t many good reasons. The best reason I’ve come across is that you might be caught (by police, teachers, employers, family etc.) and get in trouble.

Grade: C+. This is a better anti-drug ad than it’s predecessors, but it still doesn’t seem to do the job of convincing me to not smoke pot. Our tax money could be much better spent.