This year’s Super Bowl didn’t disappoint with its annual roomful-of-laughter-inducing anti-drug PSA, featuring a carelessly outspoken drug dealer warning parents that their kids can get drugs from annnnyyyywwhere. So in the grand tradition of legends like this dude and the teenager who got pregnant last Super Bowl because she was high, here’s a list of the ten anti-drug commercials we just couldn’t help but laugh at (more than usual):
10. Try Football
I know people usually smoke pot to demonstratively impress chicks, thinking that it is like a “surfing board” or some “sweet new wheels”, but it is not either of those things! Why don’t these pot smokers just do an equivalent activity instead, like football?
9. Drugs Finanace Terrorism
Could they have possibly come up with a more exploitative commercial in the year following September 11th? Maybe if the tagline were, “You know that Pat Tillman got run over by a terrorist’s drug-financed Lexus, right?”
8. Pot Burns Your Car and Guitar
I understand the part about getting high and thinking you’re some seminal musician and artistically burning your guitar, but how does pot make you lose your car?? Is this guy really buying so many dime bags, it’s keeping him from buying that $25,000 Trans Am?
7. Diving Into An Empty Swimming Pool
Is there a faster way to get your overly-cynical teenage audience to tune out faster than to open your commercial with the phrase “everyone seems to be having one dandy ol’ time”? It was frickin’ 1989 — at least refer to drugs as “bodacious” or “dudical” or something.
6. Baby Playing With Pills
A Thirteen-Year-Old somewhere in America right now: “Hmmm… a bottle of pills… I seem to remember playing with this and dancing to an electric guitar riff when I was nine months old. I think I’m going to use them to excess now, because I remember that memory.”
5. Pee-Wee Herman Talks About Crack
Everything that Pee-Wee Herman says in this commercial is pretty rational and straightforward, but there’s still something just… off… about it. Could it be that a goofy-voiced, red-bowtie-wearing owner of a magical cartoon house is talking about crack? Ehhh, maybe…
4. This Is Your Brain On Drugs
Bill Hicks pretty much sums up this unforgettable 80s ad campaign: “I have had seven balls of light come off of a UFO, lead me onto their ship, explain to me telepathically that we are all one and there is no such thing as death, but I have NEVER looked at an egg and thought it was a f*ckin’ brain. Now — maybe I’m not getting good sh*t….”
3. Talking Dog
How is this in any way an ad against marijuana? “Hey, I know this stuff may allow you to have a conversation with your f*cking dog, but you shouldn’t take it cause it’s a little bad for your lungs, plus your dog’s probably a total buzzkill.”
2. I Learned It By Watching You, Dad!
Looking back on this catchphrase-spawning gem, I just can’t get over how cluelessly 80s Cop Dad sets up his son for the moneyshot — he’s been routinely smoking pot in the house but he just has NO IDEA how his son might have learned how to use a lighter and inhale a breath? This commercial is also really helpful for the 99% of dads who don’t constantly smoke pot at home.
1. Ninja Turtles Pot PSA
When an extremely fearless bully offers you three huge joints in the middle of your elementary school hallway, take it from the Ninja Turtles — no, don’t get a pizza, Michaelangelo – get a teacher! Then call the bully an insult from a 70s blacksploitation movie, and you are in the clear!
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Singin’ and Dancin’ 80s PSA (crappy quality), Rachel Leigh Cook Loses It, Dad Draws On Kid’s Forehead, Stop Looking At Me, Guy Tries To Outrun Dog
There are literally hundreds more, feel free to drop ‘em in the comments!
