well you could say the same thing about 'this is your brain on drugs' when crack was going around. that was also a PSA that entered into the public consciousness and then turned into a joke.

That 'this is your brain on drugs' thing with the egg and the skillet was heroin, not crack. I believe they did do a crack update later where the woman took the skillet afterward and destroyed the kitchen with it. To conflate humor and lampooning of those PSAs as not taking the actual drug issue seriously is not wise, though. Many people simply realize how useless, hyperbolic, and ultimately insulting those PSAs were.

If something is scary, you show the thing. You don't make up metaphors. Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream most likely prevented more people from ever trying heroin than any government-sponsored PSA ever did.

There's an update to that ad: "This is your brain on drug policy".

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AKXN6Vdr3g0

Spoiler: same actress.

Sure, but one of these was paired with mass incarceration of a certain group of people, associated with laws that were struck down because of their disparity in sentencing. The other, not.

Never been to the States, but from half a world away and just by reading on reddit about it it all looked more like people were making fun of said meth-addicts, they (the redditors making the jokes) didn't seem to care that much about those meth addicts. This was all happening about 3-4 years ago, I'd say, and it's in very sharp contrast with the present-day opiate-related discussions which can get pretty personal. It's also interesting that the HN crowd has also joined the opiates conversation, I don't remember reading anything about the meth epidemic in the past on HN.