IPFS News Link • Drugs and Medications
.The Science Of PSAs: Do Anti-Drug Ads Keep Kids Off Drugs?
• Shaunacy Ferro via PopSci.com
Since it was established in 1998, the government has poured hundreds of millions of dollars a year into buying ad spots for anti-drug propaganda. But does it work?
Carson Wagner, now an assistant professor of journalism at Ohio University, wrote his 1998 Penn State master's thesis in media studies on the counter-intuitive effects of anti-drug ads. He demonstrated that for some kids, seeing anti-drug ads made them curious about what doing drugs would be like, even if they had never had that curiosity before.