“This is your brain,” said the pretty teenager, placing a pristine egg on the kitchen counter, “and this is heroin,” she added, hefting a big cast-iron skillet. “And this is what happens to your brain when you snort heroin,” she shouted, suddenly crushing the egg with the pan, and then smashing up the rest of the kitchen to dramatize the destructive impact of addiction.
Now actress Rachel Leigh Cook is back with another egg-based ad, two decades after that famous public service message flooded the airwaves. And this time, she has brought two eggs — one white and one brown — to illustrate the ruinous social consequences of the war on drugs, especially in communities of color, which has failed to reduce narcotics abuse while wrecking millions of lives and wasting untold billions of dollars.
The original ad was a production of the Partnership for A Drug Free America; this powerful rebuttal, and that’s what it is, was produced for the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes decriminalization, treatment, and harm reduction as alternatives to “war” and imprisonment.
