PUBLIC MARKS with tags drug & government

Advertising works – some better than other, but advertising works. So, why has the government’s $1.4 billion advertising campaign to get young people to stay away from drugs been such a dismal failure? According to the Government Accountability Office, a $1.4 billion anti-drug advertising campaign conducted by the U.S. government since 1998 does not appear to have helped reduce drug use and instead might have convinced some youths that taking illegal drugs is normal. So, it’s possible that not only did the campaign fail; it may have had the exact opposite effect. ()() I think the answer is simple. We give kids mixed messages about drugs. Alcohol and cigarettes are arguably more dangerous than marijuana, but both are completely legal. Unlike cigarettes, marijuana has been shown to have some medical benefits like curing nausea in cancer patients.

The White House has been dropping hints that the president will make health-care reform the centerpiece of his State of the Union address. The Bush administration's health care record is, to put it delicately, inconsistent. It has supported efforts to remove government influence over the health care sector, such as health savings accounts (HSAs). On the other hand, the president signed into law the largest expansion of federal power over health care in generations the ill-fated Medicare drug program.

But reporters still ignore free market advocates who predicted it. Media coverage of problems facing the new Medicare prescription drug plan focused on elderly patients left in the lurch by bureaucracy, producing what CBS’s Bill Plante called a “political headache” for the Bush administration. But in the Jan. 16 reports on the “Evening News” and “World News Tonight,” both networks ignored conservative critics who had argued the plan was doomed to fail because it was a typical big government solution that ignored the free market.