By MAANVI SINGH, NPR
Colorado’s new campaign to deter teen marijuana use tries to make the case that weed is bad for your brain.
Colorado’s “don’t be a lab rat” campaign tries to make the point that we don’t know what marijuana does to the teenage brain. (NPR)
One TV ad shows a group of teens lighting up inside a dark car as moody music plays in the background. The commercial cites a Duke University study that found a link between regular marijuana use and a lower IQ.
“Some dispute the study,” the PSA admits. “But what if years from now you learn those scientists were right?” The kicker comes as the scene fades to black: “Don’t be a lab rat.”
The campaign, which launched last month, is designed to target kids in the 12 to 15 age group. It also includes a website with links to news stories about the negative effects of marijuana (including a few on NPR.org).
To further reinforce the message, the agency has installed huge, human-sized rat cages near libraries and skate parks in Denver and at concert venues like Red Rocks Amphitheater. “It’s like a big art installation,” says Mike Sukle, who runs Sukle, the ad agency the state hired to design the campaign. “It’s the coolest thing that we’ve ever gotten to work on,” Sukle says. “But it’s a huge challenge.”
Ever since recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado in January, public health officials have faced an unprecedented challenge: explaining to teens why they shouldn’t smoke weed even though it’s legal for their parents to do so.
Surveys and focus groups the state conducted prior to launching the campaign suggest that some teens didn’t have a clue that smoking marijuana could hurt them, Sukle says. “Because of medical marijuana, a lot of kids thought it cured cancer. They really started thinking there was no harm to it.”
Campaigns against teen drinking and tobacco use have generally focused on the health risks. But while there’s no dearth of research that shows tobacco is bad for us, the research on marijuana’s effects is still in the preliminary stages. Since marijuana isn’t legal in most states, it’s been hard for researchers to get federal funding for studies, as well as access to large amounts of the substance. The Colorado campaign depends on small studies that are hardly bulletproof.
“The brains of teen marijuana users show significant abnormalities,” the website says. That’s technically true — researchers from Northwestern University observed differences in the brains of 20 casual pot users as compared to 20 nonusers. However, the researchers can’t say that these differences are caused by marijuana use, and there isn’t any evidence to show that these differences are associated with any harm. Plus the number of people in the study is so small it’s not reliable.
“A lot of the facts are from studies that are preliminary. And we wanted to be honest with the kids about that,” Sukle says. Hence the ‘lab rat’ theme. “Maybe [marijuana] isn’t going to be as bad as it looks,” he says, but it could be really damaging. The campaign asks teens whether they want to take that risk.
Read the full article HERE.
