On April 14, 2025, the Arkansas Department of Public Safety sent out a press release ahead of April 20, the unofficial marijuana “holiday.” Working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the state promoted the line “If You Feel Different, You Drive Different,” along with a blunter tagline: “Drive High, Get a DWI.”
For anyone who loves language, that release packs two classic tricks into a few words. The first line repeats itself with a twist. The second rhymes “high” with the “I” at the end of an acronym. Neither is an accident. Road safety writers have used puns, rhymes and parallel phrasing for decades, because a slogan has only a moment to stick. A slogan can prompt a pause, but when drinking or drug use has become a pattern, the next step is professional help, whether that is a primary care doctor, a support group or getting help from a luxury rehab. The wordplay gets attention. What happens after that is a different conversation.
So let’s look at how these slogans are built, why they work on the brain, and why the clever phrasing sits on top of some very serious numbers.
A Slogan Gets One Glance
Highway billboards, radio spots and social posts all share one problem: nobody is reading closely. A driver passing a sign at highway speed doesn’t have time for a paragraph. So safety messages lean on the same toolkit as a good pun. They use short words, a familiar structure and a small surprise that makes the brain do a quick double take.
That double take is the whole point. A plain warning like “Do not drive after using cannabis” is accurate, but it slides right past you. “If You Feel Different, You Drive Different” makes you finish the thought yourself. The phrase is a mirror, and once you notice that, it stays with you.
Rhyme and Reason: Why a Jingle Feels True
There’s research behind the rhyme. In a 2000 study published in Psychological Science, researchers M. S. McGlone and J. Tofighbakhsh asked participants to rate how accurate a set of unfamiliar sayings seemed. Some were shown in their original rhyming form and others in a version with the same meaning but no rhyme. The rhyming versions were judged more accurate. Fittingly, one of their examples was about drinking: “What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals,” compared with “What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks.”
The authors suggested that rhyme makes a statement easier to process, and that this ease can be mistaken for truth. They also found the effect shrank when people were told to judge the meaning separately from the poetry. This is now often called the rhyme-as-reason effect. Slogan writers have known the basic idea for a long time. A line that’s easy to say feels easier to believe.
Taking Apart the Classics
The best-known US impaired-driving slogans each use a slightly different trick. Here is how some of the most familiar ones are put together, with dates from the campaigns’ own sponsors or official records.
- “Drinking & Driving Can Kill A Friendship”: According to the Advertising Educational Foundation, this was the original tagline when the Ad Council and NHTSA launched their drunk driving prevention campaign in 1983, and it plays on “kill” as both a literal and a social ending.
- “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk”: The same foundation dates this line to 1990 and calls it the most recognized anti-drinking-and-driving slogan in America, and its repeated “friends” turns the bystander into the hero.
- “Buzzed Driving Is Drunk Driving”: The Ad Council says it refreshed its classic campaign with this message in 2005, and its equals-sign structure, with “driving” on both sides, closes the gap between “I feel fine” and “I’m impaired.”
- “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over”: NHTSA uses this rhyme for its national enforcement mobilizations, and the sober/over pairing makes the consequence land like a punchline.
- “If You Feel Different, You Drive Different”: NHTSA listed this drug-impaired driving message alongside “Drive High, Get a DUI” in its 2023 Labor Day campaign, and its mirrored structure asks the reader to connect how they feel with how they drive.
Put side by side, the pattern is clear. Each slogan takes a serious instruction and gives it a shape, whether that shape is a rhyme, a repeated word or a clever reversal. The shape is what you remember. The instruction is what you’re meant to act on.
The Numbers Behind the Wordplay
The playful phrasing can make it easy to forget why these campaigns exist. NHTSA’s most recent figures, in a report published in July 2026, show that 11,904 people were killed in alcohol-impaired-driving crashes in 2024. That was 30 percent of all 39,254 traffic deaths that year. It was also a decrease from the 12,382 people killed in such crashes in 2023, but it still means thousands of families losing someone to a crash that didn’t have to happen.
NHTSA defines an alcohol-impaired driver as one with a blood alcohol concentration of .08 g/dL or higher, which is illegal in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Utah has set a lower limit of .05 g/dL since December 30, 2018. Cannabis is a separate concern. The Arkansas release noted that marijuana can slow reaction times, affect cognitive performance and make it harder to stay steady in a lane.
That’s why the jokes in these slogans are always aimed at the behavior, not the people harmed by it. The pun is a hook. The data is the reason for the hook.
Where a Clever Line Runs Out
A good slogan does one job well: it interrupts. It might make someone hand over their keys, call a ride or rethink a plan for the evening. The Arkansas release offered exactly that kind of practical advice: don’t drive if you plan to use marijuana, give your keys to a sober driver if you become impaired, and don’t let a friend drive high.
What a slogan can’t do is treat a substance use problem. If someone keeps finding themselves in the situations these campaigns describe, the issue probably isn’t a lack of catchy reminders. That’s when talking with a doctor, a counselor or someone they trust matters more than any rhyme on a billboard.
Writing Your Own Safety Slogan
If you’re writing a message for a school project, a company newsletter or a community event, the classics offer a useful template. Keep it short. Use one device, such as a rhyme, a repeated word or a mirrored phrase, rather than stacking three puns into one line. Make sure the wordplay points at a clear action, like “drive sober” or “hand over the keys.” And test it out loud. If it trips your tongue, it won’t stick in anyone’s head.
Most of all, keep the joke on the right side of the line. Playing with words is fine. Playing down the risk isn’t.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Is there evidence that rhyming slogans are more persuasive?
There’s evidence that rhymes feel more believable. The 2000 Psychological Science study by McGlone and Tofighbakhsh found that people rated rhyming sayings as more accurate than non-rhyming versions with the same meaning, though the effect weakened when they were told to focus on meaning alone.
2. Does “If You Feel Different, You Drive Different” only cover marijuana?
No. The Arkansas release focused on marijuana around April 20, but it also addressed drug-impaired driving more broadly, including drugs that were legally obtained. The key idea is that any substance that changes how you feel can change how you drive.
3. Where did “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” come from?
It grew out of the Ad Council and NHTSA drunk driving prevention campaign that began in 1983. The Advertising Educational Foundation reports that the campaign’s first tagline was “Drinking & Driving Can Kill A Friendship,” and that the “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” line followed in 1990.
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