ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the concept of the boomerang effect and its potential to disrupt the intended messages of contemporary anti-drug Public Service Announcements (PSAs). It examines PSAs from two different anti-drug campaigns produced and marketed in the United States over the past decade: Faces of Meth and Tips from Former Smokers. However, the very kinds of observations that author have made here regarding these select PSAs reflect thematic and ideological threads in the larger, ongoing conversations about how addiction is framed in the rhetoric of American public policy, how addiction is lived in the spaces of our everyday lives, and how addiction is perceived within twenty-first-century American culture at large. Faces of Meth are community-based, grassroots, anti-drug campaign that, in its original iteration, strived to educate Oregon teens about the devastating physical consequences of an addiction to methamphetamine.
