If by advertising and "awareness" campaigns you mean forcing all children at public school to learn that smoking marijuana will make them impotent, using MDMA one time will kill them or taking LSD causes chromosome damage, and encouraging them to turn in their parents or friends if they use drugs, then yes that is what I mean. If by "advertising" you mean spending billions of dollars to put these messages on television, on websites, on the radio, in comic books, etc, then yes that is what I mean. If by "awareness and advertising" you mean giving grants only to scientists who falsify studies supporting the war on drugs, then yes that is most certainly what I mean. If by "awareness and advertising" you mean colluding with the media to spread disinformation about drugs, then yes that is most certainly what I mean. I like to lump all of this "awareness and advertising" together under the title of "propaganda" but seeing as you are a brainwashed statist fucktard I can see why you would want to call it "advertising and awareness", which is of course a euphemism, which is part of propaganda in itself. Of course overall people are stupid enough to eat it all up hook line and sinker! Jesus fucking Christ, do you think that marketing and advertising has no end result? If it had no end result we wouldn't see Coca Cola commercials or Pepsi commercials, why would they spend billions of dollars advertising if it had no end effect? Just for the fuck of it? Propaganda is proven as highly effective at swaying the desires and beliefs of a very significant segment of the population, different people are susceptible to different degrees and to different strategies, but the majority of people in the world are influenced to some extent by propaganda messages. When you have one of the richest most powerful governments in the world dumping billions of dollars into anti-drug propaganda, and using their ability to control school curriculum to spread their propaganda as well, and using their influence over the media to spread propaganda as well, and using their influence over which publishing scientists gets grants as well, you bet your god damn ass that it has an overall effect on people. Thinking otherwise just exposes your complete and total naivety, you really live in such a fucking fantasy world that it literally sickens me thinking that there are people out there who are as completely drunk on the kool aid as you are. I really wish you were just a troll! Additionally, many people drink Pepsi even though Coca Cola spends billions of dollars on advertising, but if Coca Cola did not advertise it is essentially proven that a fucking lot of people would start drinking Pepsi who currently drink Coca Cola. I highly suggest that you go to school and take a marketing 101 class. Yes countering propaganda with true education (hell, or even with more propaganda!) is an effective strategy that I entirely support. Guess what though, the military and intelligence agencies (CIA in particular) are heavily involved in spreading propaganda in foreign countries, but it doesn't mean that they stop killing the enemy soldiers! Also you are naive as hell to think that drug legalization activists are not singled out and targeted by the US Gestapo. I already know you will argue that they are not arrested for being drug activists but rather for being drug users, but only a truly blind idiot would think that the activism is not what causes them to be singled out for further investigation. http://www.ktvb.com/news/politics/Medical-marijuana-activists-children-taken-from-home-charges-pending-204966741.html It is not propaganda to say that drug users are enslaved! If somebody is put into a prison cell and told when to wake up, told when to eat, told what they can and cannot do, and they have their freedom highly restricted, then they are fucking enslaved! Not to mention that at many prisons you are essentially forced to work for literally pennies an hour if you want any pseudo-luxuries at all, like pieces of candy instead of bland oatmeal for breakfast, a cheese sandwich for lunch and a bowl of soup for dinner. So you think that the blacks who were freed from slavery prior to their deaths were never really slaves? I am pretty sure that would be widely rejected by all sane people. One does not need to have been a slave for a lifetime to have been enslaved, and thinking otherwise is just God damn ridiculous. Also you seriously must be fucking with me to say that the government did not put drug users in prison. Did the Nazis not put Jehovah Witnesses in the gas chambers, because they CHOSE to not renounce their faith? It is a perfect analogy in this case, and indeed I suspect that you will once again continue to act so offender by this perfect analogy that you don't even try to counter it. What you are saying is analogous to saying that the Jehovah Witnesses put themselves in the gas chambers and that we should not hold the Nazi war criminals responsible for what they did. Haha later on in your post you say something along the lines of 'in a libertarian world we will be forced to pay protection money to the most powerful agency', but then you argue that it is good that we have to pay protection money to the most powerful agency in a Statist world, because you think taxation is not theft when the government does it but it is totally theft if it is done in a world without a government. Talk about philosophically inconsistent and totally unprincipled, or perhaps just straight up fucktarded I suppose. Roads can be privatized, hospitals are largely privatized, public transit is largely privatized, fire departments can be largely privatized. All of these arguments are boring, old, unoriginal and fucking straight up stupid as shit. In Soviet Russia the government made the shoes, are you telling me that we should be taxed because otherwise who will make the shoes? Yeah essentially you are, and it honest to God just makes you sound like a fucking idiot.