When marijuana was legalized in Canada, provincial governments were responsible for both it’s sale and enforcement. This put the government of Ontario in a precarious position when it came to telling people about the hazards of driving high. We needed to overcome not just typical apathy for PSAs, but outright skepticism of a government many young people felt knew nothing about pot. “Barely high is too high to drive” was a relatable message that didn’t condemn the users, but helped them make choices that saved lives and spared jailtime.

In October 2018, Canada legalized marijuana. Driving whilst high on marijuana, however, remained very much illegal. But with the increased availability of marijuana and a prevailing mind-set that driving high was less risky and more socially acceptable than driving drunk, authorities feared an uptick in dangerous driving. The government of Ontario came to us with the objective: get people, young men in particular, to understand that driving while high, like driving drunk, was dangerous, illegal and could land you in serious trouble with the law.

The problem was two-fold: on one hand, research showed that road safety ads had become increasingly ineffective- finger-wagging wasn’t going to work, especially among a cohort in which 41-45% reported “0% trust in political leaders.” Additionally, as a newly legalized substance, there was no precedent for communication about it’s use in public. There was a sub-culture in which users had developed their own rules and social codes for pot and driving. How could we be perceived as an authority on something they felt they knew better than us?

Social listening wasn’t getting under the hood of this sub-culture, so we decided to bring them in with focus groups and co-create. They told us the tell-tale signs of a friend who is too high to drive, or the weird internal cues they use to know when they are sober. We realized: they were not intending to drive high, they just didn’t know they still were. For a generation dismissed as reckless, it turned out they were just ill-equipped to make the right choice. We didn’t need to tell them not to drive high, we needed to help them see they still were.

To help young drivers see that they might still be high, we created a new state between stoned and sober— Barely High. Tone was critical. This couldn’t feel like a government PSA. We weren’t going to scare them into self-reflection. So, we turned the cameras on the users themselves, highlighting weird, but truly relatable ways to recognize when you are “barely high.” The approach acknowledged that they had the right intentions- they didn’t want to drive high- they just needed to know that barely high was still too high to drive.

The idea of “Barely High” broke through by becoming part of Canadian weed culture, instead of condemning it. The concept resonated with a notoriously cynical target who embraced it as a way to make the right decision. And, at a time when the wide-availability of pot should have driven up the number of people driving stoned, we actually saw a 4% decline in the number of Canadian users who said they had driven within 2 hours of smoking or vaping pot in 2020 compared to 2019.