Back at it again, with another clever and classy mainstream print advertisement in favor of medical marijuana use, cannabis super-site Leafly.com has teamed up with Americans for Safe Access (ASA) for an encore of Leafly’s last leap into the media spotlight.
You may remember, just over a week ago, when Leafly successfully placed and ran the first “consumer cannabis” advertisement ever to be published in the New York Times. We described the NYT spot as “tasteful and informative top to bottom”, and the gurus at Leafly seem to have followed the same formula this time around too.
Leafly & Americans for Safe Access have huddled up for a 30 day series of print ads that started running this week in the ‘NFL Special Edition’ of USA Today.
| Americans for Safe Access & Leafly.com |
The ad is once again understated, and brandishes no pot leaves or visual giveaways of the subject matter – although the colors are kind of trippy man! And again, like its predecessor in the Times, the ad ties together multiple demographics, this time under the common banner of pain relief.
The ad tells us that 100 million people suffer from chronic pain.
Then it brilliantly cranks up the ego meter of the predominantly male readership of the “NFL Special Edition” by relating their everyday aches and pains to those of retired professional football players.
It wraps up quickly by stating the indisputable fact that the cannabinoids found in properly grown and harvested strains of medical marijuana can flood the user’s receptors with a natural pain relief that opiate-based prescription drugs just cannot compete with.
The quarter page ad will run for a month, and then be followed by a campaign of digital advertising aimed at the markets in New York, New England, Green Bay, Atlanta, Philly, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, and Denver. That last one might be preaching to the choir a bit.
The ad states, “9 out of 10 retired players suffer from pain on a daily basis”.
A follow-up press release from ASA says that over 4,000 former NFL players have joined in a class action lawsuit against the League, over what they deem to be decades of misinformation about the dangers of concussions.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hinted in the past that if medical experts came to him saying that medical marijuana was a legit treatment for concussions and other head injuries, he would consider allowing it. Of course, in the meantime he keeps suspending players longer for toking up than he does for wife beating.
League-wide studies have revealed that as many as 50-60% of all NFL players use marijuana regularly. Many for pain relief, many for heightened Madden skills – honestly, it should not matter which.
The players at Leafly have been going deep with their shotgun offense, and running up the score on ass-backwards prohibitionists whose only defense has been building human sized rat cages to convince our kids that weed cookies lead to rape.
It is high time for the NFL to get on the right side of history on the issue of therapeutic cannabis use.