“We don’t need pot to have fun. We’re Hispanics ... We’re cool by default.”

Molly Rosbach

A public health campaign with billboards featuring this message, aimed at reducing marijuana use among Hispanic teens, prompted a social media outcry.

Many commenters on social media called the sign racist. Others just thought it was lame.

In response to the outcry, the state Department of Health announced Tuesday afternoon it was removing the remaining billboard a few days early.

“It’s distracting really from our ability to do what we intended — which was to try to reach youth with messages that would resonate with them,” said Health Department spokeswoman Julie Graham. “It was due to come down Friday anyway.”

The billboards were part of a broader Department of Health campaign called “#Listen2YourSelfie,” an outreach project aimed at educating teens about the side effects of underage marijuana use, such as its impact on learning, memory and brain development in young people.

In focus groups with about 60 Hispanic middle and high school teens in the Yakima area, the marketing contractor Idea Marketing (a Latino-owned company) heard from local students that the existing Listen2YourSelfie materials didn’t resonate with them, and that they wanted something that specifically addressed their community.

“Doing a lot of the prevention research around marijuana, we have learned that strong cultural values and a connection to the community really protect youth against initiating marijuana,” said Idea Marketing President Patricia Lepiani, who’s based in Colorado. “So basically, since they feel so proud of being Hispanic, we wanted to find a positive angle about being Hispanic.”

In testing the “cool by default” messaging with the focus groups, she said, “All of them had a smile on their faces.”

Statewide, the Healthy Youth Survey results show that about 
20 percent of Hispanic 10th-grade students reported using marijuana, compared with about 16 percent of white, non-Hispanic students.

While 4 percentage points doesn’t sound like much, the Department of Health views it as significant, said Kristen Haley, media and priority population consultant in the marijuana prevention and education program.

Hispanic teens are one of five priority populations with the department’s outreach campaign, based on groups that historically show poorer-than-average health outcomes in a number of areas. The five groups are Hispanic teens, African-American teens, Asian-American teens, Native American teens and LGBTQ teens.

The department has created targeted messaging for all five groups in the past fiscal year, Haley said.

The “cool by default” sign was a pilot project designed to test the reception of the message. Yakima was chosen because of the large Hispanic population here, not because Yakima’s Hispanic students have an especially high rate of marijuana use.

According to the Healthy Youth Survey, in 2016, roughly 19 percent of local Hispanic 10th-graders had used pot compared with 17.6 percent of non-Hispanic students.

Anna Marie Dufault has been involved with marijuana prevention efforts in Yakima through ESD 105.

The Yakima billboard was “not designed to be racist at all,” Dufault said.

 

“When the kids were asked what it felt like to be Hispanic in this community, they all felt like they were things that were being judged harshly by the color of their skin,” she said. Thus, to more effectively get out the message of marijuana prevention, the state wanted to craft a campaign that specifically invoked pride in their culture and community.

When students were asked why they or their friends started using marijuana, “Overhwelmingly, kids said they were using because they thought it was cool,” Haley said, so they wanted the message to be that teens don’t need marijuana to be cool.

“It’s not saying ‘We’re cooler than everyone else’; it’s saying, ‘We are cool by default,’” she said. “But lots of people can have the same default mode.”

Of course, no message resonates universally, even within its target audience.

When Mickey Ruiz, 17, saw a picture of the billboard, the Yakima girl just thought it was dumb and offensive to people of other races.

“I get it, but I don’t understand what pot has to do with any different race,” she said. “I think it’s pretty lame, honestly. If people are trying to take out the whole race thing — like only white people being on billboards — then at least make it more diverse instead of trying to pinpoint one race.”

A message that would work on her, Ruiz said, would simply offer facts about marijuana use.

Kate Pizano, 16, agreed that facts and statistics would be more effective.

“I understand that it’s targeted toward Latino youth, but at the same time, I feel like it’s implying that we’re the only ones who smoke weed,” said Pizano, who is a member of the Yakima Herald-Republic’s Unleashed team of teen journalists. “I think I’d just laugh if I was driving down the street and saw it.”

She also dismissed the idea of pot’s “cool” allure: “That’s not a thing anymore. If you’re bragging about smoking weed, it’s like, ‘You’re lame.’ ”

A couple of local radio stations asked listeners Tuesday what they thought of the sign. In the 94.9 KATS poll, about 61 percent of respondents said they didn’t find the sign offensive, while about 25 percent said they did. On 107.3 KFFM, the results were nearly identical. However, in both polls, people can vote again after 24 hours, so the results are not exactly scientific.

The feedback from this small-scale pilot project will be incorporated into future marketing, Health Department spokeswoman Graham said.

“I think we’ll learn a lot from this and try to look at the broader context as we try to reach specific communities,” she said.