Warriors on Drugs

Gamers and ganja

Mike Riggs from the June 2009 issue

The anti-drug ad campaign Above the Influence is best known for public service announcements in which talking dogs castigate their negligent teenage owners and cartoonish couch potatoes try to explain away their life-ruining lethargy. Now it has set its sights on a new demographic: video game players. The campaign’s website includes animated video testimony from characters in World of Warcraft, an online roleplaying game, who were nearly destroyed by their blitzed human players.

The page features three bubbles hovering around a faceless gamer, labeled “Perception,” “Memory,” and “Hand-Eye Coordination,” each of which is supposed to explain the correlation between weed and gaming skills. Only the “Perception” bubble actually ties marijuana to performance: “Smoking pot affects…the skills required for winning a battleground, defeating an opponent, [and] beating games.” But the page doesn’t cite any actual evidence that pot affects game skills. Even if it did, this might not be very persuasive to people more interested in enhancing their recreation than enhancing their scores.