Today, I received a Mat Sheet (‘Material Sheet’, instructions on what a client needs on air, ie. a piece of copy that needs to be recorded, or a location of where to get an ad.) for the Federal Government.
The ad is a nationally produced one, and you can hear it here -> DHA0263-2-30
This is the latest commercial in a series for the National Drugs Campaign, a tax payer funded farce of a program.
This ad is typical of western government’s marketing towards their anti-drug position. Note that their actual policies seem to differ from the way they market their position on drugs.
The Australian Government’s official position on illicit drugs is one more toward harm minimisation, “The National Drug Strategy (NDS) aims to prevent and reduce the uptake of harmful drug use and minimise the harmful effects of licit and illicit drug use in Australian society.” Department of Health and Ageing, rather than one that seems to be of outright negative propaganda (listen to the ad above.).
Before I get into the ad though, there is something particularly confusing about policy and marketing in general, and it is important to keep in mind that things which are written, and their marketing are two quite different entities. I believe this is one of the effects of mass-marketing and capitalism over an extended period of time. People expect to be told what is good for them and what they need and want, after a generational shift has occured, then those people are the ones creating the marketing and products and hence the cycle continues, spiralling towards further apathy, essentially. The comprehension of shared reality has changed.
This attitude is what is taken advantage of in our Australian democracy these days. People aren’t interested in the intricacies of real democracy. In fact, how many people do you know that, “Don’t care about politics” and think it’s cool to not care, and vote for which ever name they find prettiest on the sheet, which, by the way, ends up being their only contribution to supposed democratic society.
People DO however, care about their money and the products that they purchase with that money. So, essentially the democratic process has turned into one of dollars, which means that the real movers and shakers are businesses that actually bother, and are capable of lobbying and addressing the government.
This business orientated approach to democracy, coupled with the generational shift in reality-comprehension opens the door for a system of government that is based more on marketing for votes, rather than intelligent debate and discussion on policy which will effect us all.
The ad posted above preys on exactly this attitude, by putting forward a typical myth-based and base level argument on marijuana usage, the idea that the catalyst for laziness and lack of motivation towards goals that were originally sought after, is the drug itself, rather than any other issue.
There are absolutely no facts in this piece of propaganda what so ever, this argument (amotivation propagated by marijuana usage) is one similar to, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”. In a day and age when we have so many facts about marijuana, both toward the positive and toward the negative, it is appalling to see a tax-payer funded campaign preying on emotional ideas, rather than rational concepts about the drug.
This year, 2010, is an election year for Australia. Drugs are still a big issue for our country in many ways. In the problems that they can and do cause, through addiction, through the black market which supplies it and through the criminal underworld which runs this. Many people have probably been directly effected by someone who has used or uses drugs, but the reasons why people use drugs are a totally different, large issue which I won’t get into here. The fact is, drugs, as a whole in our society are one of the key social issues for many people, and many people aren’t willing to look any further than some emotional pain they attribute to drug use, or any further than a propaganda campaign such as this one, or the many urban myths floating around about drugs.
My biggest qualm here is with the Australian Government using social money (taxes) to fund a propaganda campaign, one which has been shown to NOT be effective (There are many reports out there on the ineffectiveness on the “War on Drugs” in the west, specifically in the U.S., where this “war” was started by Nixon in 1969, but one of the most revealing juxtapositions is in looking at drug use statistics of a city like… Amsterdam, and then comparing it to a city like Melbourne, where our drug laws differ drastically. What is seen in the above linked report, is a DROP off in the usage of drugs like marijuana, rather than an increase, even though gettin’ high is legal in Amsterdam. While in our country, drug use is much more prevalent and has actually risen since the billion-dollar “War on Drugs”. Again, this is another, large issue that I won’t get into right now).
What to do about this?
Well, it is an election year, and apparently we’re still a democracy, so I suppose the most rational way forward is to start a lobby group, work out key points, work out key MP’s and lobby them with this view point. I would love to do this, but my motivation of late is lacking (see the blog about Street Art, up the top.).
I rang one of the numbers from the australia.gov.au/drugs website to complain about the misuse of social money, but instead got a drug counsellor. I told him of my qualm anyway, and he told me, on the downlow, that he completely agrees (an attitude I come across in EVERY health professional, counsellor and person working with drug users and abusers that I meet and chat with) and he reminded me that this year is an election year.
I would love to be involved with changing the attitudes towards drugs, changing policy and furthering research into such a vast and interesting field of…. maybe something to think of for the week after Maitreya….. hrrrmmmm….
My pizza has a heart! It is love pizza!
Other than alcohol fuelled violence and stagnate culture, this is Ballarat's other problem. Fairy grass from "Lake" Wendouree blowing into the rich resident's surrounding Lake Wendouree's front yards.
In Lak’ech Ala K’in
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