What did Donald Trump do today?

He decided to do the first ever anti-drug campaign, as far as he knows.

Speaking at a conference today, Trump announced that he would launch an anti-drug campaign:

We're going to be doing something that's, uh, I think going to help a lot, we're going to do very big advertising campaigns, just like a campaign for, running for president. We'll spend a lot of money but it'll be a very small amount of money, relatively, we're going to advertise how bad drugs are for you. They ruin your look, they ruin your face, they ruin your skin, and ruin your teeth. If you want horrible teeth, take a lot of fentanyl. If you want to have skin that looks so terrible, take fentanyl. We're going to do, uh, we're going to show what these drugs are doing to you, nobody's done that before, and we're going to do it.

In reality, mass media anti-drug campaigns have been around so long that they're even older than Trump himself. For example, the film Reefer Madness, which shows teenagers under the influence of marijuana losing control of themselves and going on a crime spree that includes rape and murder, was released in 1936.

It's unlikely that Trump never heard about Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, or the D.A.R.E. program that generations of schoolchildren sat through, or the ironic-iconic "This is your brain on drugs" ads from the 1980s, or McGruff the Crime Dog, or any of dozens of other forms of anti-drug messaging. What's not clear from today's remarks is whether he remembers them now.

Trump himself has some experience with illegal drug use. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician who did such a good job exaggerating Trump's health during his first term that Trump tried (and failed) to get him confirmed as Secretary of Veterans' Affairs, handed out controlled substances for the asking to White House staff without a prescription. Jackson also mishandled or could not account for Schedule II drugs—the most restricted drugs allowed to be prescribed—including fentanyl, according to a Defense Department investigation.

White House Medical Unit controlled substances tracking document, 2019.

The Navy eventually took the extraordinary step of demoting Jackson out of flag officer rank, although Jackson continued to falsely claim that he was still an admiral until the demotion was made public. 

Why does this matter?

• If Trump's memory failed, then even by his standards, that's a pretty big lapse.

• The reasons people get addicted to opioids generally don't have much to do with their feelings about having good skin.