Anti-drug public service announcements have a long history of missing the mark. From the classic, to the racist, to the admittedly kind of funny, the efficacy of these campaigns have always been dubious at best, and counter-productive at worst. This isn't to say drug awareness and education is not a worthwhile investment of government resources, but as any millennial who was pushed through the wildly ineffective DARE Program will tell you, the choice to use or not to use recreational drugs is a personal one, unlikely to be swayed by thinly-veiled propaganda.
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- Michael steals from his baby sister's piggy bank to score money for pot. This is not a product of cannabis usage. This is the product of Michael being an asshole.
- Many of the cartoon characters are hip to drug slang. Bugs Bunny easily identifies a joint, which isn't too far a stretch given his drinking and smoking cigarettes for decades in the Looney Tunes universe; watching a much more innocent Simon (of the Chipmunks) identify marijuana on sight and describe the effects is a bit jarring.
- Michael begins his descent into reefer madness the way so many after-school special and so few real-life children do: by stumbling upon some older "cool" kids smoking behind a building and being peer pressured into taking his first hit. The characters constantly assert that nobody has every tried drugs of his or her own volition.
- Seeing these cool kids doing their thing, Michael obnoxiously greets the group with "You guys cruising for lung cancer or what?" Fuck off, Michael.
- One of Michael's frenemies offers him crack as the next step up from smoking pot. Everyone in this group is completely on board to smoke crack with no hesitation.
- A girl in this friend group later offers to get them some crack if they can scrounge $10. The group points out that Michael has $10, right? They grab his wallet and run off with it, as is the norm for drug buys between friends.
- Michael apparently keeps an ocarina in his drug box.
- The Cartoon All-Stars escalate from berating Michael (ironically, using peer pressure) to coercing him to change his ways to physically assaulting him and threatening his life with drowning and buzz-saws in the final segment.
- Michael's future is presented as that of a shriveled up heroin junkie, since the Cartoon All-Stars are staunch propagators of the "gateway drug" narrative. Modern government websites acknowledge that isn't actually a thing.
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