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The Office of National Drug Control Policy has launched an anti-marijuana ad campaign to drive young people to their new website, freevibe.com. The site represents a media repositioning after the failed Just Say No and DARE campaigns.

Their strategy has evolved and improved. The "media hype" section of freevibe.com is an effort to distance themselves from the perception of DARE and Just Say No as dogmatic. This section tells kids that much of the media content out there is false and that kids are smart enough to decide for themselves what to believe. Overall, the site tries to provide a perspective from which kids can think of not using drugs as a statement of their individuality and confidence.
http://www.freevibe.com/index.shtml

But despite these strategic innovations since Just Say No and DARE, freevibe.com still utterly fails to accomplish its most critical task: winning credibility with teens and young adults.

On the front page of the site, the anti-drug messages come from several angles at once: illegal drugs destroy the environment, marijuana can lead to rape and unwanted pregnancy, marijuana kills drivers and passengers, not to mention the horrific side-effects. Any rational kid is going to click away immediately because they'll realize they've just wandered into an evangelist site and they're about to get a whole big lecture they didn't order.

A second problem is that they don't acknowledge the experiential benefits of marijuana, or that the benefits exist. What the site could have done, but failed to do, is create an atmosphere where teens can acknowledge that the site has a point, without requiring them to contradict parts of their existing belief systems. Instead, they swing for the fences, hoping teens will completely absorb the site's anti-marijuana logic and will discard all perceptions from friends and the media that smoking pot is at all pleasurable.

One more key dimension is missing from the site's assessment. The fact of the matter that we've found in our research again and again, is that smoking pot is an enormous social definer. A kid starting at a new high school in a new town can be part of a social group in a matter of days by smoking out with the kids that smoke out. That's enormously powerful in a way that the "peer pressure" concept doesn't begin to explain. Oversimplifying or pretending this power is not there creates even more of a disconnect in the attempt to win credibility.
click to see some of the campaign's broadcast spots