FROM THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE

On the desk of Alan Levitt, the man who heads the national advertising
campaign to get kids to stop using drugs, sits a glass bowl with a plastic
fish inside.

Levitt likes to hold it up for visitors in order to make a point: He feels
like the fish in the bowl, constantly on display, always under someone's
watchful eye.

And he's right.

Since the Office of National Drug Control Policy began its unprecedented $1
billion, five-year, anti-drug campaign 30 months ago, Congress and the
press have been relentless in their scrutiny of the program's progress.

Now, halfway through its course, the ad campaign may be showing some early
signs of success.

Yet most of the attention has been on the campaign's blunders.

While struggling to get its anti-drug ads off the ground, the drug policy
office has been forced to defend itself against attacks on several fronts.

Media outlets accused the office of censorship and tampering with network
TV scripts; Congress is investigating fraud and overbilling among the
office's contractors. At times it seemed as if the office spent the first
half of the campaign fighting a lot more than youth drug use.

The campaign had its origins in the famous egg-and-frying-pan ad of the
late 1980s and early 1990s: "This is your brain-splat-this is your brain on
drugs." That ad was created by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a
private, nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of professionals from the
communications industry.

Major advertising agencies donated ads for free, and the media ran them as
public service announcements. In 1989 and 1990, the partnership's combined
media exposure reached the equivalent of $1 million in advertising spending
per day. The ads seemed to be helping.

By 1992, adolescent drug use was at a low point.

Between 1985 and 1992, monthly use of illicit drugs among adolescents 12 to
17 years of age had dropped from 3.2 million children to 1.3 million,
according to the annual National Household Survey on Drug Abuse conducted
by the Health and Human Services Department.

But a year later, things started to change.

In 1994, the number went back up to 2.1 million.

The partnership's ads were receiving less and less exposure because the
national media, mainly network television, was splintering.

By 1997, the trends were not good. Drug use, particularly for marijuana,
was up among adolescents. The combination of negative trends and the
changing media market led Jim Burke, the chairman of the partnership, and
retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the director of the Office of National
Drug Control Policy, to press President Clinton and Congress for government
money to pay for placements of the anti-drug ads. With encouragement from
Clinton, Congress appropriated $1 billion to the drug policy office for an
anti-drug media campaign aimed specifically at youth. The money, however,
came with several stipulations. Every media outlet that accepted paid
advertising from the campaign had to match that air time, or advertising
space, with an equal amount of unpaid public service announcements, or with
other programs or activities related to reducing youth substance abuse.

Passage of the law set in motion the largest government-sponsored ad
campaign ever, designed to include television, radio, print, billboards,
and interactive media.

The government campaign still uses ads from the private partnership, but
shapes their tone and content.

In the past, the partnership had a reputation of using scare tactics (as
well as inaccurate information) to emphasize the negative consequences of
drugs. But the drug policy office decided that it wanted the ads to stress
not only the bad consequences of drug use, but also the need for
responsible parenting and the positive aspects of a drug-free lifestyle.

It established a panel of behavioral scientists to review the partnership
ads to ensure that they were in line with the campaign's message.

Making all the campaign's components come together has not been easy,
however. Although the partnership likes the increased exposure of its more
widely placed ads, its creative players have felt stifled by the
government's oversight.

Before the government's involvement, 100 percent of the direction for the
ads came from a creative review panel at the partnership, said Shawn
Clarken, the partnership's creative director. "When the [government] got
involved and had control of the purse strings, the situation changed
dramatically," Clarken said. "Now their social scientists do a final review
of the ads. Frankly, it's been a source of creative tension."

Levitt, federal director of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign,
insists that the drug policy office's scientific approach and review are
absolutely necessary. "These are taxpayers' funds," he says. "We need to
make sure that we're hitting our targets."

Bickering with the partnership has perhaps been the least of the drug
policy office's problems.

Its biggest blow came in January, when Salon.com broke a story exposing the
office's practice of awarding millions of dollars in financial credit to TV
networks, including NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox, whose prime-time programming
complied with the media campaign's anti-drug message.

If an episode of a TV series contained an anti-drug message, the network
would get credit for that, and this credit would reduce the number of free
public service announcements it was obligated to run. The network could
then sell the time that might have gone for public service announcements
for paid advertising. Episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 and Chicago Hope were
among those that received the office's stamp of approval.

Soon after, Salon.com ran stories highlighting similar deals that the drug
policy office had with print publications, such as U.S. News & World
Report, Seventeen, and USA Weekend.

After the first story broke, members of Congress and the media criticized
the practices on two grounds-that they were a scam of the original intent,
and worse, that they raised the specter of the government determining what
people read and viewers watched.

Both Congress and the media demanded that the drug office change its
policy-which it has, sort of. Today, the drug office insists that at the
time the stories broke, two fairly innocent policies were unfairly jumbled
together in the public's mind. One policy, the office says, involved only
consulting. Levitt says that TV and film writers would come to the office
for advice on how to accurately depict drug use in their scripts.

Levitt and his colleagues would field their queries and offer advice, he
says, often without knowing what show or movie was being discussed.

At the same time, he and others in the office were also reviewing scripts
and articles with anti-drug messages submitted by networks and publications
that were seeking public service announcement credit. Levitt insists that
the two procedures never overlapped and that the office staff never knew
that some of the episodes and stories they were reviewing had not yet been
aired or published.

Since then, however, it has altered the guidelines it provides to media
outlets that are seeking credit.

Any program or article submitted must have already been printed or
broadcast.

Publications can only seek credit for features, not news stories or
editorials. Moreover, Ogilvy and Mather, the advertising agency that has
been hired to purchase media airtime and space for the campaign, is now in
charge of reviewing scripts and articles.

Levitt and others at the drug office continue to field phone calls only
from writers seeking technical advice.

Still, despite the revised policies, many policy experts and First
Amendment advocates have ongoing concerns about the drug policy office's
relationship to the media. "The only reason that people haven't become more
outraged about this form of censorship is because it's difficult to
understand," says Graham Boyd, director of the Drug Policy Litigation
Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The bottom line is that TV
networks and publications make a significant amount of money by conforming
their messages to what the government wants to hear. I can't imagine the
public would stand for that if the messages involved women's reproductive
rights or other controversial issues."

Just last month, the anti-drug campaign found itself again on the
defensive. Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Government
Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human
Resources, called an Oct. 14 hearing to examine possible mismanagement,
overbilling, and contract fraud within the media campaign. It was the
campaign's seventh congressional hearing.

For hours, Mica and Republican members of the subcommittee grilled Levitt
and other officials about allegations that Ogilvy and Mather had inflated
its labor costs and overcharged the government millions of dollars. The
drug office maintains that it is not at fault, and pointed out that it was
one of its own officials who brought the questionable billings to light and
withheld $15 million to Ogilvy and Mather and other contractors. Still,
Congress ordered the Government Accounting Office to investigate further.

Despite these setbacks, the media campaign's leadership is confident it
will succeed.

Levitt points proudly to the office's outreach to the entertainment
industry, its placement of more than 300,000 public service announcements,
and its targeting of ads at ethnic communities as positive signs of the
campaign's progress.

But the campaign's true measure of success-lowering youth drug use-has yet
to be determined. The National Institute on Drug Abuse is conducting an
evaluation of the campaign, with the help of Westat, a survey research
corporation. The first results are scheduled for this spring.

In the meantime, drug policy officials are sleeping easier, knowing that
the rate of overall drug use among youth appears to be going down. Between
1997 and 1999, according to the household survey, the percent of youths
using drugs dropped from 11.4 percent to 9 percent.