In this world of legal marijuana and clinical ketamine tests, somehow D.A.R.E., that cheesy 80s anti-drug program, still exists. Their main schtick was bringing creepy cops into schools to scare children, getting kids used to the presence of the empire’s stormtroopers at a young age to reduce the chance of adult resistance. Recently, the organization’s obsolescence and antiquated drug war mentality was put on full display, when they posted a ludicrous, satirical anti-marijuana news story on their site as truth.
According to the Washington Post, the joke story claimed “Marijuana candies, sold on the street as ‘Uncle Tweety’s Chewy Flipper’ and ‘Gummy Satans’ are taking the country by storm,” and “For every one joint of marijuana, four teenagers become burdened with pregnancy.” Not only did D.A.R.E. repost the story, but they kept it up on their site for almost a month without anyone questioning its bizarre, over-the-top declarations.
The facetious piece certainly resembles the ridiculous crap peddled by the anti-drug industrial complex (like this mid-aughts PSA asserting that weed will get you pregnant), and D.A.R.E. was apparently unable to smell the difference between satire and their own, real brand of scaremongering flatulence. The piece was taken down from the D.A.R.E. site once the Post’s Christopher Ingraham contacted them for comment, but not before the writer grabbed a few screenshots:
Ingraham points out that the story is the product of yet another “fake news site,” a type of publication he rightly refers to as “a pox on the Internet.” The satirical story’s author, one Haywood Bynum III, has also previously authored pieces like “Oklahoma Hospital Hires Faith Healers, 14 Patients Instantly Cured of Terminal Diseases,” and “Are Women Even People, Really?”
So why does it matter if a group of jerks falls for a joke by some other jerk? Well, for one, D.A.R.E.’s mission is supposedly to educate people about a prominent, embattled contemporary issue. And as Ingraham writes:
D.A.R.E. still receives funding from the Justice Department, the Department of State and numerous other government agencies and corporations.
For the past month, that funding has been used to spread the message that marijuana is a “third world drug” that causes teen pregnancies and leads to “primal aggression,” and to promote demonstrably false claims about people killed by marijuana edibles.
