When crime prevention strategies are effectively crime promotion

So when my mom asked, "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?" I wasn't merely being snotty when I said "Yes!"

I was right, too!

Instead she'd have been better served by asking, "Do you realize that out of dozens of friends and hundreds of peers, only 2 of you thought that was a good idea?"

Somehow I doubt it matters one bit how you use reverse psychology (or don't), they'll have sex anyways. It might work fine for things like "Walk against red at a crossing", but with sex your fighting hormones.

The legal age for consent is 15 in my country, so the idea is somewhat absurd to me. There was plenty of virgins in my high school, plenty who wasn't (and some lost theirs quite a bit earlier). Doesn't seem to matter one bit.

Although maybe that mind trick worked on me when mother told me to go out and have fun partying with the other kids when I hit puberty, I go out drinking substantially less than my peer at the university do.

This needs to be sent to our alchol stores that are a monopoly controled by the government (I think that's absurd too) who are only allowed to run adds against drinking, it would be hilarious if they started running adds telling you to drink.. so you wouldn't.

I live in Sweden, btw.

makes sense.

the most effective anti drinking campaign I saw during my undergrad days was a group called the "silent third" or and the message was to highlight that a third of college students don't do any drinking at all contrary to MTV's and the film industries portrayal of college students.

He uses a false analogy in my opinion. Hotel guests don't congregate and ask each other, "Do you reuse your towel?" The ad campaign may be effective in that case. But if you tell a group of teenagers, "Most teenagers don't do drugs" they'll know the campaign was lying when they go to their first party and someone comes back from college and passes the pipe around. (College kids are cool, so do what they do.)

A better campaign might be to explain why using real life cases. It isn't hard to do this with alcohol or heroine, but it may be difficult with something like weed.

I think this can apply to drug prevention strategies as well:

DARE - to teach kids about drugs.

In other words, don't say thing to kids like, "don't stuff beans up your nose."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BEANS