Get Sensible Announces New PSA Video Project 🚀🎥🎬

Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the Get Sensible team are thrilled to announce that we were selected as part of the Ontario Cannabis Store’s Social Impact Fund. We are honoured to be in company alongside many other projects doing important work in the cannabis space to improve the wellbeing of people who use cannabis and outcomes for communities impacted by cannabis policies.

This project is focused on co-creating a series of Public Service Announcements alongside young people with lived experience of cannabis use, to mobilize tangible harm reduction tools through relatable messages. Young people are a priority population under our cannabis legislation, disproportionately affected by cannabis policies and regulations and often lacking access to evidence-based information on responsible consumption and harm reduction.

Much of the media surrounding cannabis use history has relied on stereotypes, stigmatizing and fear mongering under the guise of education but science has shown that these methods are ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. This project seeks to create accessible and non-judgemental media demonstrating how to have healthier and more productive conversations about cannabis and cannabis use and how to foster healthier relationships with cannabis from the perspective of young people with diverse backgrounds and experiences while mobilizing harm reduction messages and promoting responsible consumption.

The video series would use humour and relatable and realistic representation to make messages resonate and so that people share them with friends, family, and peers. Leveraging Gen-Z humour with elements of satire, irony, and commentary, the videos would subvert traditional PSA tropes to convey harm reduction messages promoting responsible consumption in ways that are engaging and entertaining rather than stigmatizing and fear mongering. The video series, similarly to much of our materials, would prioritize diverse representations of youth experiences and accessibility.

As part of this project, Get Sensible will be hiring a youth content creative team to serve as a writer’s room with hopes to engage young people in or from Ontario with lived experience who are early in their career as artists (writers, actors, videographers, editors, etc.) so follow us to stay in the loop for opportunities to get involved!

For more information about the project or for media inquiries, please reach out to heath@cssdp.org or kiah@cssdp.org.