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Comment by baldeagle | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic - I remember a anti-drug commercial that features a thin brunette girl scrubbing the gout of the tile on her bathroom floor with a toothbrush while the jingle went "oooo, meth, oooo, meth - I don't sleep and I don't eat, but I've got the cleanest house on the street, oooo, meth".

Now I never really wanted to try drugs, but that seemed more like a pro-meth ad than an anti-meth ad.

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Sweet you tube searching goodness, someone finally posted it. Other people also commented how awesome the song was, especially if you were watching it on a little TV at the distance of a classroom away. Check it out.

https://youtu.be/fY1Pl1zGowc

WOOOOOOOOW! that's AWESOME

That's not a parody? I've seen it before and I assumed it was a parody, not an actual anti-drug ad.

Pro/anti drug advertising is just weird. I remember seeing this ad on TV in the 90s when I had not been in the US very long and being utterly perplexed as to what it was that viewers were being urged to buy. I was very surprised later on to discover that it was a hay fever remedy, as opposed to an anti-depressant or similar psychiatric drug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzGjmUKPXhY

I'm sure future generations will look back at contemporary TV commercials and wonder why every disease in the early 21st century had a cute little nickname. I blame Pokemon.

That ad is almost indistinguishable from something like the Tim and Eric Show. (Or maybe VHS-looking video and the special effects of the era is all I need to perceive it that way.)

Wow. I always thought of Tim and Eric as more of a funhouse mirror to low-budget 90s video production, but that... That genuinely looks like a Tim and Eric sketch. The measuredly frantic pacing, the incongruous juxtaposition of composited video, the creepy smiles, are all part of their playbook.

Ha, yep. I'm half expecting this to be some hoax actually created by Tim and Eric, or maybe it's their secret source of inspiration.

Cynically, I always figured anti-drug advertising is directed at elderly conservatives rather than actually trying to decrease drug use. If the side effect is to increase drug use whilst increasing outrage in their chosen demographic, that might be a political-positive-feedback-loop.

I also wonder if advertising execs are more likely to do drugs, and hence be somewhat surreptitious with their campaigns.

Sadly, the fake "not even once" meth ads were more effective than the real ones.

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