JUST SAY $1 BILLION

If all the merchandising might of Hollywood couldn't make America's
teen-agers buy "Godzilla," why does anyone think that a five-year, $1
billion government ad campaign is going to make kids swear off drugs?
Especially ads like these.

No sooner was this new exercise in bipartisan idiocy announced by Bill
Clinton and seconded by Newt Gingrich last week than the premiere
commercial of the campaign hit the networks. In this elegantly shot display
of high-concept Madison Avenue creativity, a young woman armed with a
skillet angrily smashes an egg and then an entire kitchen to dramatize the
destructiveness of heroin.

The ad is an oh-so-hip variation on a Golden Oldie of Reagan-era anti-drug
advertising -- remember that fried egg once labeled "your brain on drugs"?
- -- and it sends bizarrely mixed messages.

The woman looks like Winona Ryder; she's wearing a tight tank top; there
are no visible track marks on her junkie-thin arms; and the kitchen
representing her drug-induced hell is echt Pottery Barn, if not
Williams-Sonoma.

Far from discouraging teen-agers from drug use, our anti-heroin heroine --
so sexy when she gets mad -- may inspire some of them to seek out a vixen
like her for a date.

The mixed messages hardly end there. Not only will these ads coexist on TV
with those pushing beer and pharmaceutical panaceas but with a commercial
culture that in general subliminally sells intoxication. "A lot of
advertising equates products with drug experiences," says Thomas Frank, the
author of "The Conquest of Cool," a scintillating history of the modern ad
biz. Whether it's a soft drink like Fruitopia trading on psychedelic
packaging or a stylish new car promising its owner escape and speed or a
Nike shoe bestowing enhanced physical powers, the ubiquitous message of the
advertising medium is Get High. Though the new anti-drug campaign is the
largest government merchandising effort in history, it's hard to imagine
how it will be heard above the din surrounding it. Even at almost $400
million a year (half public funds, half pro bono freebies from media
participants), it's still a far smaller campaign than McDonald's current
and as yet inconclusive effort to win back its youthful defectors.

Meanwhile, the industry publication Brandweek has challenged the methods of
academic studies that the Partnership for a Drug-Free America trots out to
defend the efficacy of anti-drug advertising. It calls the research
"flimsy," adding that its findings "would hardly justify launching a new
stain remover, let alone a program meant to help keep children sober and
alive."

While partisans on all sides of the drug wars have condemned the new ad
campaign as wasteful, arguing that the money might be spent better on
either more law enforcement or on more after-school programs and drug
treatment, the public has been mum. This only encourages Washington to
think of advertising as the new instant remedy to fool voters into
believing that it is addressing intractable problems; Speaker Gingrich,
proposing a new tobacco bill to replace John McCain's, has already
suggested that anti-smoking ads be its centerpiece. What's next? An ad
campaign to brainwash Americans into believing that they can trust their
H.M.O.'s? It's enough to make you pine for the usual government gimmick of
appointing blue-ribbon commissions to finesse hard policy questions,
whether about AIDS or women in the military or Social Security. These
commissions don't do anything either, but at least they don't cost us a
billion bucks. Where is all that money going?

To advertising agencies and their media outlets, from newspapers to MTV.
Advertising Age reports that most of the first $90 million installment will
go -- where else? -- to Disney. The mouse will throw in some bonus public
service announcements on ABC, a Web site and, who knows, maybe an Epcot
ride simulating the OD experience, in exchange for a $50 million
"multimedia, cross-property package." The idea of Disney being on the
Government dole is amusing enough, but it may also introduce a new economic
model to the long and tortured history of the drug war. Where once we had
companies that laundered drug money, now we have corporations synergizing
anti-drug money.

Should its "Armageddon" not cross the line into profit, Disney's share of
this Washington bonanza may be just the fix it needs to help it feel no pain.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski