ANTI-DRUG PITCH GOES WIDE

When Congress launched the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign five years
ago, it explicitly tied future funding to hard evidence of success. Today,
there is anything but that. Teenagers are increasingly using the illicit drugs
the campaign has most often railed against, according to a recently released,
congressionally mandated study.

The Pride Survey found that from 2001 to 2002, for instance, marijuana use was
up among all grades studied (sixth through 12th) except for the 10th grade,
which showed a 0.1% decline.

Marijuana use nearly doubled, from 2.9% to 5.2%, among sixth-graders and rose
from 7.2% to 10.2% among eighth-graders.

Congress should at least cast a skeptical eye on the Bush administration's
request to expand the media campaign with $170 million in funding next year,
$20 million more than it received last year. The media campaign's concerns have
often been legitimate. It is quite reasonably trying to reach the one in six
high school seniors in the United States who report driving under the influence
of pot, more than half of whom say, alarmingly, that being stoned does not
compromise their driving ability.

However, the way in which the campaign has tried to get its messages across is
stodgy and unlikely to connect with kids. "There has always been a lot of talk
about drunk driving, but another problem is Drugged Driving," one new ad reads.
"Just like alcohol, if you are driving under the influence of drugs, your
response times are slow and you could be distracted. Have you ever been in a
car where someone wanted to drive drugged?

What did you do? What would you do?" Drug czar John P. Walters has mismanaged
the media campaign in other ways - using taxpayer dollars to directly attack
state medical marijuana programs and ballot initiatives, for instance. This
spring, Walters boasted to Congress about a study conducted by the Partnership
for a Drug-Free America (which, in a blatant conflict of interest, helps
produce the campaign's ads). The "good news," he said, was the study's
conclusion that "40% of teens said that anti-drug advertising made them less
likely to try or use drugs." A more independent study released by the
University of Pennsylvania this year not only found "no evidence of a positive
effect," it concluded that teens who saw the ads "tended to move more markedly
in a 'pro-drug' direction in their attitudes over time." Sermons to teens can
often have a boomerang effect, leading them to dismiss the real dangers the
sermons are railing against.

That, however, is not the lesson Walters took home from the Pennsylvania study.
When its skeptical results came in, he opted not to renew the university's
contract.

Turning a blind eye to unwelcome facts is no way to run an effective anti-drug
campaign.