Above the Influence - What Has Weed Done For You? (2009) :30 (USA)

This should be redone as "what has alcohol done for you?" These are the situations and mistakes often made by people under the influence of alcohol rather than weed. In college people I knew failed because they drank too much and were too hung over to get to class. My roommate would get drunk and call his ex all night long. This commercial just left out the part where he threw his phone off the balcony and punched holes in our door and drywall. I have never seen anyone who was smoking weed behave like that. As far as being drawn on...Go to Collegehumor.com and look at all the pictures of people who have been drawn on or worse. In these pictures one can also often find left over cups, cans, and bottles suggesting a night of hardcore drinking. I have never seen anyone smoke enough to be drawn on without them knowing it. When it comes to ditching friends anyone who has ever been to a bar with friends while consuming heavy amounts of alcohol more than a few times has ditched or been ditched by their friends without even being aware of it.

The only thing this commercial got right is that the "weed smokers" in it appear to be happy, coherent, and seem to posses their reasoning skills

Agreed. This commercial insinuates that smoking weed will cause you to fail your classes, make your mother cry, and ditch your friends. However, these events can and do happen to people who do not smoke weed and, as gunnarj points out, to people who drink alcohol - which is legal and "socially acceptable."
The fact is that weed is no more harmful than alcohol, anyone can look up the research that has been done on the medical properties of marijuana to find that it is many times less harmful to smoke a bowl than to go out for a night of binge drinking. Similarly, weed will not make you any more of a "loser" than you choose to be. True, you could decide to drop out of school and smoke weed all day, but you can just as easily decide to drop out of school and drink all day (or drink all night and choose not to go to school the next morning because you feel like someone is pounding your head in with a sledgehammer - whichever order you choose). It is all about decision-making. Smoking weed isn't going to make a responsible person any less responsible because they know when they can do it and how often they can do it, the same goes for drinking. Partaking in the smoking of weed is not going to turn your life upside down, so long as you do it responsibly. Everything in moderation, right? Just think, alcohol, which is legal, can be enjoyed in moderate amounts, but if you drink in excess it will cause problems in your daily life. That is true for everything: food, coffee, exercise, television, water-insoluble vitamins, weed...
Of course, weed poses its own problem because it is illegal. Everybody needs to take a step back and ask themselves some questions about weed:

1) Why did weed become illegal in the first place if it is less harmful than tobacco or alcohol?
2) Why is hemp (a non-psychoactive relative of the marijuana we smoke) illegal as well even though it can produce stronger ropes than nylon, more durable clothes than cotton, the cellulose needed to make paper, and provide a source of alternative fuels (not to mention it grows everywhere - it's a weed!) among many others?
3) If weed has more carcinogens (cancer causing agents) in it than tobacco, why do pot-smokers have lower incidences of lung/oral cancers?

There are many other questions to ask, too many to name off! However, my point is that it is ridiculous to lie to the public by showing these misleading advertisements. We have been misled about weed for too long in this country and it is about time to start demanding the truth. Think about this: Congress initiated the Controlled Substances Act in which they divided drugs into 5 "schedules" (classes), 1 being the worst and 5 being the "least controlled". Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug, stated as having no medical significance whatsoever, something that is blatantly false. Meanwhile, cocaine is a schedule 2 drug, claimed as having medical importance...which do you think is worse? If your child smoked marijuana and found that it was nowhere near as detrimental to their everyday life as commercials like these claim, would they say to themselves "Well, they are obviously lying to me about weed, so maybe they are lying to me about other drugs." The only thing is, there are some drugs out there that are detrimental and we wouldn't want our youth ingesting. But, by lying to them we foster distrust and close the door to an open discussion of the use of any drugs.
I am not advocating the use of any drug, I am only saying that it is a personal choice that should be made with up to date, TRUTHFUL information by responsible people. I don't think this is too much to ask.