The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is targeting its anti-drug messages directly to youth by maintaining a blog, a podcast, and now, a series of videos on YouTube.

On its very special YouTube page, ONDCP publishes lame videos which are supposed to make teenagers not want to do drugs. For some reason, all the videos have a very poor rating from the users who rated them. That could be because teenagers are a little smarter than the government gives them credit for, and can see right through the blatant propaganda.

What, after all, does running away from a rabid dog have to do with marijuana?

ONDCP says on its YouTube page that “there has been a 20 percent reduction in the number of young people using drugs. This translates into 700,000 fewer young people using drugs today than in 2001.”

Where do you suppose all those people went?

“If just one teen sees this and decides illegal drug use is not the path for them, it will be a success,” said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

By contrast, a two-minute video of a burning marijuana cigarette produced by High Times magazine has been viewed more than 17,000 times since March. “You have a lot of illicit, if not illegal, world views and cultures represented on the Web,” said Rick Cusick, the magazine’s associate publisher. — Washington Post

ONDCP “supports a balanced strategy for reducing the harm that drugs cause to America,” the YouTube page says. “These efforts include preventing drug use before it starts, providing drug treatment to addicts, and disrupting the market for illegal drugs.”

Oh yes, disrupting the market! Great job you’re doing there!

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports, police made 786,545 arrests for marijuana in 2005, an all-time record.

“Over the past several years there has been an explosion in the number of Americans using emerging technologies to publish their views, learn about important issues, and to communicate with each other,” said John Walters, Director of ONDCP and President Bush’s Drug Czar, in a news release. “We know that in order to remain effective communicators in this new information age, public institutions must adapt to meet the realities of these promising technologies. We hope that citizens, community leaders, and parents will use these new tools to learn more about what their government is doing to reduce the harms drugs cause and how they can join us in our efforts to make America safer.”

Putting three quarters of a million harmless pot smokers in prison, few of whom did anything wrong, is harm reduction?

“These numbers belie the myth that police do not target and arrest minor marijuana offenders,” said NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre, who noted that at current rates, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 40 seconds in America. “This effort is a tremendous waste of criminal justice resources that diverts law enforcement personnel away from focusing on serious and violent crime, including the war on terrorism.”

Of those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 88 percent some 696,074 Americans were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,471 individuals were charged with “sale/manufacture,” a category that includes all cultivation offenses even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use. In past years, roughly 30 percent of those arrested were age 19 or younger.

“Present policies have done little if anything to decrease marijuana’s availability or dissuade youth from trying it,” St. Pierre said, noting young people in the U.S. now frequently report that they have easier access to pot than alcohol or tobacco. — National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws

It would appear that the reduction in marijuana use among teenagers is largely due to them being thrown in jail.

St. Pierre also suggests that the decline in arrests for harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin means that law enforcement resources are being diverted away from these more dangerous drugs and toward marijuana.

Here’s a radical thought for you. People have an inalienable right to smoke marijuana, just as they have a right to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. (While the people don’t have a right to hurt other people while under the influence or otherwise, they have a right to harm themselves all they want.) That someone passed a law against it is a violation of that right.

Moreover, banning outright a product that is in demand leads, as we saw 80 years ago, to the creation of black markets run by organized crime, and these days, by terrorists. Remember that your government is propping up these organized crime syndicates and terrorist organizations by keeping the products illegal.

If you really want to reduce crime — not to mention terrorism — decriminalizing drugs would be a very good start.

(Hat tip: Bodyhack)