Hacker News Reader

Its provocative but is it a good use of funds?

they spent 465k already, can spend up to 1.4 Million just on an advertising campaign. Those funds could be used to actually help users.

from the governor's own tweet. "3,366 people were arrested last year because of meth in SD. 13 people died."

they spent 35k per overdose death for awareness. Surely the funds couldve been better put to use

View on HN

Counter is that it reduces the population of users. Simply diverting funds entirely to helping users would seem to invite perpetual spend.

Does it reduce the population of users? People are I know who were meth users were aware of the dangers...

Actually yeah that's a fair point. Thinking back on my comment, I'm not sure that what I said stands up.

I'm not even sure how one would go about measuring it, given all the other initiatives happening concurrently with this ad campaign.

Intuitively, something a bit attention-grabbing like this could reach more people than some stodgy "drugs bad mmmkay" thing, and I don't think it's wrong to spend a small percentage of a large harm-reduction budget on an awareness campaign. But that's about all I'd be confident saying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com