ANTI-DRUG ADS SHIFT BLAME TO PARENTS, AND I CRINGE

If I see one more television ad telling me that teen drug abuse is all my
fault because I stomp all over my kids' individuality, I'm going to scream.
When I learned that my tax dollars help put these pieces of anti-parent
propaganda on the air, I wanted to scream even louder.

If you watch TV, you know the ads I'm talking about. The ones that look
like they were filmed in the Hillary Clinton It Takes A Village Production
studio.

The worst one features a creepy kid with a scrawny ponytail and piercings
on his face. He tiptoes over piles of debris on his bedroom floor as he
heads for the door.

Just then his mother appears. For a moment, you think sanity is going to
prevail. You think she's going to do something motherly, like order him to
clean his room, remove the hardware from his eyebrow and lose the ponytail.

But no. This is a hip mom. A nonjudgmental mom. A millennial mom. She
smiles warmly at this freak and asks where he's going, whom he'll be with
and lovingly reminds him to come home by 11.

There's another ad in this weird anti-drug campaign. It opens with a noisy
mosh pit on a club floor. A dancing girl leaves the mob to sneak into a
dingy bathroom. She ducks into a stall. She doesn't do a line of coke. She
calls home to ask if she can stay for another hour.

You can't hear hip millennial mom's end of the conversation. But because
the girl didn't hang up in a huff, you have to assume her mother said
something like: ``Of course you can stay out later! Have fun! And thanks
for calling!''

Both of these ads end with the same sanctimonious refrain:

``Let your kids be who they are. But know what they're doing.''

Spare us. Please.

These spots do absolutely nothing to curb teen drug use. If anything, they
encourage it by undermining parental authority. Plus, they annoy the very
people the ads are aimed at -- parents like me.

Someone needs to tell the media elites who made these nutty spots that kids
don't turn to drugs because their parents make them clean their rooms or
because they aren't allowed to put holes in their eyebrows.

Kids do experiment with drugs when their parents are so busy being
nonjudgmental that they forget to set the rules.

Perhaps the biggest reason I detest these ads is the way my 13-year-old
daughter looks at me whenever they come on.

``See,'' she says, shooting me that look.

See. You're too strict. If you don't let me express myself, I might wind up
on drugs someday.

I want to tell my daughter that part of the problem with being a teenager
is that teens can't be themselves. They have no idea who they are yet.

These awful ads are brought to us by the nonprofit Partnership for a
Drug-Free America. They're paid for by private donations and then given to
the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign.

Which is where your tax dollars come in.

According to USA Today, the Partnership set aside $929 million in the past
five years to fight teen drug use. Part of that money is used to buy air
time for these anti-parent ads.

I spoke with the Partnership's deputy director for public affairs, Howard
Simon, Wednesday. He admitted that the ``Let Your Kids Be Who They Are''
campaign has generated strong reaction from outraged parents. But some
parents love them, he noted.

Mr. Simon said his organization has produced 600 ads -- including the
memorable fried egg (this is your brain on drugs) spot -- in the past 15
years. These latest were not the first to generate complaints.

The new ads weren't meant to lecture parents, Simon said. They were
designed to remind adults to monitor their teens. To keep track of their
comings and goings, and to know their kids' friends.

That makes sense.

Unfortunately, these ads don't.