AlterNet recently posted an article called “Five Things the Corporate Media and Government Don’t Want You To Know About Marijuana.”
One of the points covered is that anti-pot ads make people want to smoke pot. (I can vouch for this — the “anti-drug education” in my elementary school made me super-curious about drugs). The article has ad spots that are filled by an ad server. A company pays AlterNet to hold the space open, and then serves up whatever ads its clients provide. And as it happened, on one of those pages, an anti-pot ad appeared just above the part of the article that tells us that anti-pot ads make you want to smoke pot. You would think somebody planned it that way but I’m sure that nobody did.
I found it enlightening reading Oliver James’s book, “They F*** You Up”, where he cites studies that show that kids who grew up in a prohibitive environment when it came to drugs had a significantly higher rate of drug abuse than those who were free to experiment.
I’ll see if I can find the source …