Politics
Feds Launch New Marijuana-Focused Ad Campaign To ‘Challenge The Dangerous Belief’ That People Drive Better While High
The Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Ad Council are rolling out a new campaign to “challenge the dangerous belief that it’s safe to drive after consuming marijuana,” with a disturbing ad that they say depicts a real-life story of a child killed by a driver who was under the influence of cannabis.
In an announcement on Tuesday, the Ad Council promoted the “Tell That to Them” initiative, which includes a 60-second ad showing a person claiming they “focus” better when driving while high and then causing a fatal car accident.
“I actually drive better when I’m high,” the man says. “If anything, I’m more careful, more chill, more relaxed.”
He is then shown driving head-on into an incoming car.
DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) partnered with the Ad Council for the campaign.
“Too many young men think marijuana doesn’t affect their driving ability or even makes them safer drivers,” NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison said in a press release. “That couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“Marijuana slows down a driver’s reaction time and impairs their coordination and judgement,” he said. “This new PSA reminds motorists that driving high puts us all at risk and can have deadly consequences.”
Michelle Hillman, chief campaign development officer at the Ad Council said their research “shows some young men don’t see the risk associated with driving while high—and even more concerning, some even believe it makes them better drivers.”
“This new PSA taps into the justification some drivers tell themselves and interrupts it with our campaign’s central message: ‘If you feel different, you drive different,'” she said. “We’re proud of this new work that builds on our 30-year partnership with NHTSA to reshape driver habits, and we’re grateful to our trusted creative partners at Standard Practice for bringing this powerful message to life.”
The ad campaign represents a departure from recent cannabis-related NHTSA ads, which have taken a less “Just Say No” approach to marijuana use risk messaging and, at times, leaned into to cannabis culture to promote education around the potential consequences of driving while high.
NHTSA’s “If You Feel Different, You Drive Different” campaign kicked off last year, with ads discouraging marijuana-impaired driving around Thanksgiving and winter holidays like Christmas.
What stood out about the messages and graphics was the lack of fear-mongering and negative depictions of cannabis consumers that’s long been a hallmark of federal marijuana PSAs, such as those funded by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in the 1990s and 2000s that perpetuated stigmas about laziness or forgetfulness.
Instead, NHTSA seemed to be leveraging cannabis culture, with warnings against impaired driving that are coupled with images meant to appeal to marijuana consumers.
Now that tone has shifted, with the latest ad depicting a man looking as an unconscious mother and deceased child’s feet after a car accident that’s being attributed to marijuana use by an over-confident driver.
It’s unclear if this is directly or indirectly responsive to language in a spending bill approved by the House in July that would block the federal traffic safety agency from supporting ads to “encourage illegal drug or alcohol use.” Prohibitionists have celebrated the inclusion of those provisions.
Morrison, the head of NHTSA, said in August that he was prepared to “double down” on increasing awareness about the risk of marijuana-impaired driving in partnership with the White House.
In 2021, meanwhile, NHTSA tried to get the word out about the dangers of impaired driving through an ad featuring a computer-generated cheetah smoking a joint and driving a convertible.
Critics noted that the world’s fastest land animal hardly fits the stereotype of a cannabis consumer that the government has historically played into, while other commenters pointed out at the time that the ad made the cheetah look confusingly cool as he’s broke the law.
The agency also played on horror-movie tropes in a 2020 ad featuring two men running for their lives from an axe murderer. The pair ultimately find a vehicle to escape the scene, but the driver pauses before he turns the key in the ignition. “Wait wait wait,” he says. “I can’t drive. I’m high.”
While it’s widely understood that driving under the influence of cannabis is dangerous, the relationship between consumption and impairment is a messy one.
Last year, for example, a scientific review of available evidence on the relationship between cannabis and driving found that most research “reported no significant linear correlations between blood THC and measures of driving,” although there was an observed relationship between levels of the cannabinoid and reduced performance in some more complex driving situations.
“The consensus is that there is no linear relationship of blood THC to driving,” the paper concluded. “This is surprising given that blood THC is used to detect cannabis-impaired driving.”
That report was by no means the first research to challenge the popular view that THC blood levels are a suitable proxy for driving impairment. In 2015, for example, NHTSAconcluded that it’s “difficult to establish a relationship between a person’s THC blood or plasma concentration and performance impairing effects,” adding that “it is inadvisable to try and predict effects based on blood THC concentrations alone.”
In a separate report last year, NHTSA said there’s “relatively little research” backing the idea that THC concentration in the blood can be used to determine impairment, again calling into question laws in several states that set “per se” limits for cannabinoid metabolites.
“Several states have determined legal per se definitions of cannabis impairment, but relatively little research supports their relationship to crash risk,” that report says. “Unlike the research consensus that establishes a clear correlation between [blood alcohol content] and crash risk, drug concentration in blood does not correlate to driving impairment.”
Similarly, a Department of Justice (DOJ) researcher said last February that states may need to “get away from that idea” that marijuana impairment can be tested based on the concentration of THC in a person’s system.
“If you have chronic users versus infrequent users, they have very different concentrations correlated to different effects,” Frances Scott, a physical scientist at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Office of Investigative and Forensic Sciences under DOJ, said.
That issue was also examined in a recent federally funded study that identified two different methods of more accurately testing for recent THC use that accounts for the fact that metabolites of the cannabinoid can stay present in a person’s system for weeks or months after consumption.
