The White House felt it might be seen as opportunistic to announce Office of National Drug Control Policy advertising campaign aimed at preventing the abuse of prescription drugs. The reason was the unfortunate and coincidental death of actor Heath Ledger. Although reports noted that preliminary autopsy results were inconclusive, sleeping pills were found near his body.
According to reports, teens are avoiding illegal drugs but use of ill-gotten prescription medicines has been on the upswing. WH Press Secretary Dana Perino did not know when the event would be rescheduled.
RBR/TVBR observation: Hey, we’re big kids. If we’re big enough to use such drugs, we’re big enough to get straight talk from our government. It would seem that this would be the perfect incident to scare kids straight. So let’s add this to the list of demands. We’re adults — we and our children will be able to withstand the horrific effects of an occasional slip of the tongue that results in a bad word going out over the airwaves, and we’d prefer that to a national nanny putting the freeze on the free exchange of art and information over the airwaves out of fear of a national nanny. And we’re adults — we can handle bad news and strongly-worded advertising campaigns. Now go out there and have kick off your campaign, Mr. President.
