TIL A company in the 90's made pencils with the anti-drug slogan "Too Cool to Do Drugs" but had to recall them because, when sharpened, they read "Do Drugs"

Anti-drug education consisted of three main groups of people:

  • Law enforcement who, from bottom to top, only care about catching people and don’t actually give a shit about effective prevention.

  • Subversives who don’t care about anti-drug education but are compelled or required to participate. This is mostly teachers but probably a few youth leaders as well. This group does the bare minimum to not get called out as part of the problem.

  • Well meaning fools who lack the skills to build an effective program. These are mostly parents and community leaders who have a very limited understanding of how drugs work or why people use them but they have a lot of love to give towards their families and communities. This group is the only one who will take proactive steps to try and reduce drug use but they rarely have the ability to make informed decisions or measure the results of their efforts.

This last group is who made the pencils. They have a prior that drugs are bad, a desire to inform young people that drugs are bad, and they know that students use pencils. That’s 90% of the thought process. There’s no concept of a follow up to see how effective this is or how the students are actually responding. They don’t consider that people may not take their message exactly as intended. They don’t question anything really. I don’t want to call these people stupid but if you’ve read this far I think you’ve come to that conclusion anyway.

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