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.”
Read the rest at reason.com.