The infamous anti-drug campaign of the early 2000s
Infodumping: my Anti-Drug.
Hello and welcome to the first Chatterbarks post! Chatterbarks is basically an infodump of miscellaneous stuff delivered to your email infrequently. This has been in the works since late last year and it sure as hell doesn’t look like it but please enjoy this post!
The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign of the U.S. Government started running in the early 2000s an anti-drug campaign entitled… “The Anti-Drug”. That is to say, according to the now defunct website, a “hobby, person, or passion that stands between [someone] and drugs”.
Anti-Drug, also known by it’s website’s name, Freevibe, produced some of the most infamous anti-drug PSAs of the era which would become the subject of parodies and are still remembered and mocked to this day. In particular, the “Recurring” series of PSAs are still noteworthy for the responses and parodies that came out in response.
The Anti-Drug campaign was planned to run from November 1999 to June of 2004. The initial campaign featured television commercials, youth outreach programs, and athletes and celebrities promoting anti-drug messages. It didn't take long for problems to arise. In late 2002, a government study found that the campaign had little effect on teens in terms of keeping them away from drugs.1 Worse, the ad agency hired to produce the ads, Ogilvy & Mather, was found to have overbilled the government by about $1 million, and the ensuing trial sent two marketing executives to prison.2 Around this time, the government also tried a little post 9/11 scaremongering by telling the nation that their pot addiction was funding the next 9/11:
Don’t fuck with Krista.
After the study was published, the government decided to shift focus of the Anti-Drug Media Campaign towards a slightly older age group, and focus more on marijuana. From there, some absolutely iconic anti-weed PSAs were aired:
The Recurring Ads
I don’t actually know if there’s an official name for this campaign, but I call them the recurring ads because of the basic premise:
The ads in this campaign consist of a few seconds of 2 or more people under the influence of marijuana. In the first segment, we first see the characters and we see that they are smoking weed.
In the second segment, the exact same scene as before plays out, this time with a slightly different ending.
In the third or fourth segment, sometimes one of the characters will do something funny or say something funny.
In the final segment, usually the fourth or fifth. Something seriously bad happens to the characters, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Cut to tagline: “Marijuana can impair your judgement [or something similar]. Harmless?”
At the time, the Anti-Drug campaign’s website, Freevibe, called these “hard-hitting new ads that make us question drugs and consequences”. In reality, people laughed at most of these ads, as seen by the parodies included below.
“Den”
The setup:
Two teens are smoking weed in a (presumed) parent’s office.
They say some funny things about fishes and their sisters.
One of them suddenly takes out a gun and accidentally fires it while pointing at his friend.
Well that came out of nowhere. Feels to me like they might’ve been struggling to make this one work:
“Okay so we have these kids smoking pot and at the end one of them is going to grab a gun all of a sudden and kill his buddy. What do we do in the middle?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Make the other kid say he finds his friend’s sister hot?”
Alternatively, they could’ve had some issues finding out what bad thing should happen to the kids, and some guy just raises his hand and goes gun. The gun does just show up out of nowhere, hidden from the viewer until the final shot. It’s no wonder this was derided as absurd.
This PSA was parodied in one of the Harold and Kumar films, shown below:
Concert
The setup:
Two teens are smoking weed inside a stadium restroom stall.
They get so high they forgot where their seat was.
Cop suddenly shows up and arrests them.
Yeah, I mean that’s pretty harmless nowadays. It still holds true for places where pot is still illegal, and if the venue doesn’t allow marijuana you’ll probably get kicked out, but this PSA is definitely becoming a product of its time. Not that it was ever good anyways, since it relies on your fear of authority to keep you from smoking weed. Now that legalization is gaining traction, there’s not much holding this one up.
Drive Thru
The setup:
A group of guys are stoned and in the drive thru of a burger joint.
They make jokes to the lady at the intercom.
At the final shot, they realize they don’t have any money and bail out. Unfortunately the little girl on the bike is right in front of them, and she gets run over.
Probably the most famous of this series. Like the others, many found this one hilarious. It does actually look like the girl slows down right before they hit her, and although it would probably suck to be a little kid in that type of collision, I figure the impact wouldn’t have been that bad. She’s fineeeeee.
The burger place is named Jimmy’s Place. Normally in these types of productions, a fake appearance is given to these filming locations. Jimmy’s Place, however, was the actual name of the restaurant featured here. This now-defunct restaurant was located in San Fernando, and it looked pretty much unaltered until it’s closure in the mid 2010s. Before closure, a few Yelp reviewers mentioned how this place was the filming site for the infamous PSA. Even more mentioned how awful the food was (FWIW, people either loved it or hated it). After closure, Jimmy’s Place stood abandoned for a handful of years until it was demolished and a CVS Pharmacy opened in it’s place. Once the spot of an anti-drug PSA, now the spot for getting your drugs. Nice.
This PSA was parodied on Chappelle's Show:
Party/Couple
(Named “Party” by the uploader, officially the name given by Freevibe is “Couple”)
⚠(DUE TO THE NATURE OF THIS PSA, CONTENT WARNING FOR SA)
This is not included to make fun of, but just demonstrating the lowest point for this campaign. The twist is that the girl gets taken advantage of because she’s too stoned to respond. This PSA appears to have been shortly lived and is considered rare, although a copy of it existed on the Freevibe website for several months. Due to the rarity and subject matter, this one doesn’t get a lot of mentions either online or in other media. Several years ago, a PSA in New Zealand had a drunk woman getting kidnapped, and faced controversy of victim blaming. Even if accusations of victim blaming didn’t pull “Couple” down from the airwaves, it would almost certainly never even be put on today’s airwaves. This one is definitely the one that least aged well.
On a lighter note, the Anti-Drug campaign continued onwards with other series of PSAs. While I won’t go into too much details, here are some other things Anti-Drug did in the early 2000s:
Summit High
Summit High was a Flash animated webtoon that first appeared on the Freevibe site around 2002, the same time as the PSAs mentioned above. By 2005, the webtoon was no longer being advertised on the front page of Freevibe and presumably was also removed from the site. The plot was about a group of high school freshmen who are also part of a band named Bitter Hope, and deal with drug related issues.3 The page to view Summit High episodes were saved by the Internet Archive, but are not viewable, even if using the Ruffle flash emulator. Therefore, Summit High appears to be lost media.
Yu-Gi-Oh!
The collaboration between Yu-Gi-Oh! and Anti-Drug has become notorious within the anime community in recent years as this campaign has resurfaced. Alongside a similar campaign with Pokémon, 4Kids partnered with the U.S. government to produce a set of 4 stickers to be distributed to Blockbusters across the nation.4 The stickers featured the Yu-Gi-Oh cast and what inspires them to stay away from drugs (none of which were “I am a fictional cartoon character and cannot do drugs”). The back of the stickers directed kids towards the Yu-Gi-Oh website or Freevibe, hinting at “new video featuring the cast of Yu-Gi-Oh! battling a different kind of monster...”
Those who did watch this in the day probably did not get what they were expecting, rather a lecture by Yami Yugi about how bad marijuana is. I certainly wasn’t expecting to hear the word “marijuana” from Yugi’s mouth when I first saw this one. Nowadays, this one has become more of a meme and another example of how ridiculous anti-drug PSAs are.
It was all for nothing. A few years after the end of the campaign, in 2006, a new report revealed that the anti-drug campaign basically had no effect at all in stopping kids from smoking pot.5 After the Anti-Drug campaign ended, the government began running a new campaign, “Above the Influence”, which picked up Freevibe’s torch and carried on making stupid PSAs, but were apparently much more effective at stopping kids from getting stoned.
I guess all that Freevibe needed was to tell kids that their crudely drawn dog would be disappointed in them if they smoked pot.
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(EDIT 05/29/2023: Updated link to a removed video.)
Hornik, Robert, et al. Evaluation of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign: Fifth Semi-Annual Report of Findings. Nov. 2002.
“Ogilvy & Mather North America Agrees to Pay U.S. $1.8 Million for Overcharges on a Contract with Drug Czar’s Office.” U.S. Department of Justice, 4 Feb. 2002, www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2002/February/02_civ_057.htm.
“Summit High.” Freevibe, 9 Dec. 2001, web.archive.org/web/20011209175153/www.freevibe.com/headsup/summithigh.shtml.
“Honor: My Anti-Drug.” Yugipedia - Yu-Gi-Oh! Wiki, archived 28 Dec. 2022, web.archive.org/web/20221228161750/yugipedia.com/wiki/Honor:_My_Anti-Drug. As of writing, Yugipedia suffered a data loss. This page was archived beforehand.
United States Government Accountability Office. Contractor’s National Evaluation Did Not Find That the Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign Was Effective in Reducing Youth Drug Use. Aug. 2006.