President Bush Wants To Spend More Money On A Useless Program

As part of his record-setting budget proposal, President Bush wants to increase funding for anti-drug ads that have been proven to be completely ineffective:

President Bush has proposed a significant jump in funding for an anti-drug advertising campaign that government-funded research shows is at best useless and at worst has increased drug use among some teens.

The administration has asked for a 31 percent increase in funding for the advertising campaign that a nearly five-year study concluded had increased the likelihood that all teens would smoke marijuana. The White House proposal would increase the program’s budget to $130 million over the next year.

What’s even more appalling is that the Bush Administration was aware of the study results last years, and said nothing about it:

The bad study results weren’t news to the White House, which sat on the research for a year and a half while continuing to fund the ad campaign on the basis that the study was still ongoing, Slate magazine reported in September. In October, National Journal reported that John Carnevale, former director of budget and planning for the drug czar’s office, admitted that the office “did not like the report’s conclusions and chose to sit on it.”

It’s bad enough when government spends money on something that is later shown not to work, but it’s even worse when the people who run the program deliberately withhold information showing the program to be ineffective.