But these ads seem to be eliciting a very different response than was probably intended.
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Use a human-sized sloth, of course. “In this case, those general recommendations were things like being aware that teenagers are intelligent and have access to a lot of information, so campaign approaches should respect them and give them credit by avoiding hyperbole”.
Others have been left scratching their heads about whether a fear of being unable to pass the salt at the family dinner table is enough to turn young people away from the lure of drugs, while many have pointed out that sloths are such a widely loved animal, it’s likely to make smoking marijuana look cool.
A government campaign centered around a stoned sloth has backfired spectacularly on social media where it has been deemed ‘the worst, and most hilarious anti-drug campaign ever’. Of the teenagers that #StonerSloth targets, 28% of females and 24% of males regularly drink at risky levels.
A leading drug research centre has distanced itself from the NSW government’s weird “stoner sloth” campaign, which attempts to warn teenagers against the dangers of sustained marijuana use by depicting them as disturbingly oversized versions of the South American mammal.
This is exactly what Australian authorities have made a decision to do with “Stoner Sloth”.
Its disgusted peers mock it as a “Stoner Sloth” after its various failings. The anti-weed brigade in Australia has been promoting a bunch of ads with the tagline “You’re worse on weed”, and the sorry mascot of these ads is, of course, a sloth.
Mashable points out that a WHOIS search on the Stoner Sloth’s website points to the New South Wales Department of Premier of Cabinet.
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The ads are targeted towards teens with a series of videos and social media posts that uses the sloth to represent a person under the effects of marijuana.
