N
F
E
R
F E AT U R E S
H
DO SCARE
TACTICS WORK?
Graphic anti-smoking and anti-vaping messages
may do more harm than good
Words: Gordon Stribling
Most readers will be all too familiar with fear
appeals, having sat through some awkward or
painful educational videos, plays or performances
during their school years.
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From smoking to drugs to speeding to unprotected
sex, these messages aim to strike fear into the
hearts of young people tempted to push the
boundaries of what society deems acceptable
behaviour.
Since the ‘teen vaping epidemic’ narrative began
to spread a few years ago, several campaign
groups and public health bodies have adopted
this approach to deter teens from using
e-cigarettes.
The FDA’s ‘Real Cost’ campaign featured a creepy
video dubbed ‘vape worms’, with the so-called
vaping epidemic characterised as a parasite
that bores into the brains and bloodstream of
careless teens.
To be fair to the FDA’s creative team, the narrator
did not claim that vaping causes parasites. However,
if conventional wisdom is to be believed, the
alarming image should have made teens think
twice before using e-cigarettes.
The ‘vape worms’ campaign harked back to ‘This
is Your Brain on Drugs’, an iconic anti-drugs
campaign from the 80s depicting the drug-addled
brain as a fried egg. The ad has been revisited a
few times over the years, most recently in 2016,
and continues to inspire memes and parodies
decades later.
There was also shades of the widely discredited
1980s Drug Awareness Resistance Education
(DARE) program.
In 1994, the Department of Justice conducted the
first study of its kind evaluating the effectiveness
of the DARE campaign. The study revealed only
short-term reductions in tobacco-use, but not
alcohol or marijuana.
The researchers concluded: “DARE had no
statistically significant main effects on drug use
behaviours and had few effects on attitudes or
beliefs about drugs.”
The issue with these campaigns was that the
messages were easy to discredit. The brutal
simplicity of ‘Your Brain on Drugs’ was its undoing.
‘Drugs’ as a single entity do not literally fry the
brain. Meanwhile, DARE’s claim that cannabis
had no medicinal value and causes insanity, in
the 1930s propaganda film, Reefer Madness, was
easy for science to dismiss.
Even indisputable messages such as graphic
warnings on cigarette packages have their critics.
A 2018 study published in the journal Plos One
compared the effectiveness of graphic warnings