Hickenlooper’s “Lab Rat” Campaign a Blunder

Young people (teens, specifically) aren’t stupid or simple. They are intelligent and capable of understanding many complexities that, perhaps, we as parents would prefer against. Wouldn’t parenting be so simple if our children were dumb? It would be so easy to keep them safe if they weren’t any smarter than a quail. We could simply draw a chalk line on the ground and say, “Don’t cross this, it’s bad on the other side.”

I’m being facetious, of course. While smart kids do come with a bevy of complications, I am happy that my boys are intelligent, free-thinking people. It makes my life a bit more anxious at times, but it’s as it should be.

Scare-tactics have generally failed, to some degree. Sure, they may successfully frighten off a few people, but most of us tend to see through the veil and want our own experience of whether something is good or not. Some anti-drug campaigns utilize scare tactics quite well. Anti-meth ads, for instance, show a pretty clear picture of what happens when you use meth – and it’s a scary reality. But that is the difference. Scare-tactics work only when they are telling the truth about a genuinely scary thing. Meth really does that shit to your body, those images aren’t so much a “tactic” as a look into the future.

You just can’t do that type of thing with marijuana because the reality of marijuana is not scary at all (unless you’re Maureen Dowd), it’s quite the opposite.

So, you can imagine how loud my eyes rolled when I read about Colorado Gov. Hickenlooper’s anti-teen-marijuana use campaign. Much like the ridiculous “this is your brain on drugs” egg-frying scenes from my youth, the Governor’s message is “Don’t be a lab rat.”

This campaign has placed human-sized rat cages (water dispenser and all) at schools and bus stops. The message, ostensibly, is that when you’re a teen and using marijuana, you are potentially altering your brain’s development, thus treating yourself like a lab rat in an experiment. I, personally, think that’s a weak connection and an even weaker appeal to kids. There may be some merit to the claims that young cannabis use may affect your brain, but why not just tell kids about it rather than wrapping it up in a ridiculous package (well, cage in this case)?

The Boulder Valley School District has opted out of the Governor’s scheme. BVSD communications director Briggs Gamblin stated, “We don’t see human-scale rat cages as something that’s going to be seen as a positive or intelligent way to approach young people…We worry about some of the messages…and that how they are worded could feed into stereotypes, especially since that is a time when peer approval is so important.”

Exactly! The best message you can tell kids is the truth. It not only gives them the actual honest information from which to base their choices, but it bolsters the credibility of authority figures when kids realize they haven’t been bullshitted.

“Already the cages have been vandalized and co-opted as the backdrop for photo selfies of teens puffing away in the cage. Who knows, this campaign has become such a joke that local marijuana growers may even introduce a new hybrid strain of marijuana called Lab Rat.

The campaign’s theme concerning the developing brain is reasonable. Many, however question the tactics used. The cages may well be a catchy public relations stunt about the human brain, but they don’t appeal to young people’s natural intelligence.

Instead, this campaign is cut from the same old cloth as other sensational anti-drug campaigns that have done little more than foment cynicism and mistrust and that miss the mark for meaningful, realistic and honest dialogue about drugs.

The psychological divide between an adult world that has deemed marijuana worthy of legalization and the prevention world that still vilifies marijuana and other drug use creates a schizophrenic split in a teen’s realities – and is much more confusing for them than the questions over marijuana’s changing status.”

As a parent, I want to see evidence-based drug education that tells the truth to our children. I want them truly prepared for life without my constant guidance, not armed with bad information that will most certainly lead to an uneducated choice. By the way, Colorado spent 2 million dollars on this lunacy. Any CO residents out there have better ideas for where that money could have gone?