Three months ago, Donald Trump promised to spend "a lot of money" on "very, very bad commercials" that would "scare" teenagers away from opioids by depicting "pretty unsavory situations." Today the White House unveiled four of those government-sponsored ads, and they are indeed very, very bad, in the sense that they rely on deceptive tropes and misleading half-truths.
"The first four ads, which are based on real life, tell the graphic stories of four young adults going to extreme lengths to maintain their prescription opioid addiction," says White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. "These ads show young adults how quickly opioid addiction can occur, and the extreme lengths to which some go to continue use of drugs while in the grips of addiction."
All four ads feature young people who deliberately injure themselves so they can obtain prescription pain medication. Amy crashes her car into a dumpster, Kyle smashes his hand with a hammer, Chris closes his arm in a door, and Joe drops a car on himself by crawling under it and releasing the jack. "I didn't know they'd be this addictive," each of them says in a voice-over narration. "I didn't know how far I'd go to get more."
As is traditional in anti-drug propaganda, these spots present extreme outcomes as common, grossly exaggerating the chances that any given drug user will end up like the pathetic souls they depict. That approach won't be credible to anyone who knows better, and it does a real disservice to people who need opioids to relieve severe pain by portraying medical use of these drugs as a gateway to hellish addiction.
Two of the four self-maimers (Amy and Joe) say they got hooked on pills that were prescribed for pain, suggesting that opioid addiction begins that way something like 50 percent of the time. But that scenario is actually pretty rare. Nonmedical users generally do not get opioids through prescriptions written for them, and people who become addicted to pain pills typically use a variety of drugs and have histories of substance abuse. In a 2007 study of people entering treatment for addiction, 78 percent of the OxyContin users "reported that the drug had not been prescribed to them for any medical reason." Almost all of them used other drugs in addition to OxyContin, and three-quarters of them had previously been treated for substance abuse.
K is the way! Can't help it, it changed my life.