Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "If that $3.4 million gets even one kid to never touch drugs, it's money well spent."
There are something like 25 million Americans between the ages of 12 and 18. The vast majority of them are going to try drugs. If we spent $3.4 million on each of them to halt drugs it would cost 85000 billion dollars. (I.e. $85,000,000,000,000.00 which is roughly 10 times the US total GDP.) Of course next year we'll have another crop of 2.5 million new teenagers to immunize, and that will cost another $14,000,000,000,000.00.
It gets worse, of course. If it takes a $3.4 million commercial to convince "one kid to never touch drugs", then, by the law of diminishing returns, it's going to cost more than that to convince the second kid.
It's not at all obvious to me that this would be money well spent.
-- Carl
P.S. I've never tried the stuff, but this doesn't have anything to do with what the government says. In fact, most of what the gov says is obviously "reverse speak". That is, what the government states is almost always the exact reverse of what is actually the case. From this, it's easy to deduce that there are some people who are convinced to try drugs by the very fact that the government is so much against it. For example, after the government tells them that sex is such a bad idea, who knows how good drugs might be. |
