PRESIDENT TO KIDS: DON'T INHALE EITHER

PRESIDENT CLINTON launched his $2 billion anti-drug campaign on Thursday
and, like most things he does, it was all media hype. He even said so.

That's what Clinton calls the five-year program -- the "Anti-Drug Media
Campaign," as if all problems can be solved with the right spin in the
right ads. It's the thoroughly modern non-answer to a problem by the
thoroughly modern politician.

The campaign is supposed to let teenagers know -- via TV, the radio and the
Internet -- that drugs are bad, and they shouldn't try so-called "gateway
drugs" like marijuana.

It's a huge, multimedia, dot-com version of "Reefer Madness." Yeah, that'll
work. That'll keep kids from trying drugs.

"We can see evidence that ads can sell things," said Kendra E. Wright, head
of a Beltway drug policy outfit called Family Watch. "But we have no
evidence that they can unsell things."

Yes, but ads can be so good at selling voters on the idea that you're doing
something positive for America's children.

In fact, the ads may have exactly the wrong impact.

Wright described some of the ads she and her children have seen because
Washington, D.C., has been one of the 10 test markets for the campaign.

"One ad shows a good-looking kid with a skateboard smoking a joint. We
showed it to some social scientists and they said they're almost
glamorizing drugs."

One of the ads, according to Wright, actually gave the wrong kind of
education in drugs.

"I have two stepsons, 10 and 14, and they watched one ad about using
household inhalants to get high. They didn't know anything about this
before. Now they know how to do it."

Things you can learn from your government.

Another ad was canceled because of the uproar it caused among gays.

"It showed a young boy using drugs, so-called gateway drugs, going on to
heroin, then becoming a male prostitute selling his body to men," said
Wright. "It was as if being gay was worse than being a heroin addict."

Well, ad campaigns are very tricky things. "It's hard to boil down large
problems to a 30-second spot," said Wright.

It's especially hard when you're trying to unsell drugs, and right between
ads selling beer. What, exactly, is the message here, when beer is the
gateway to alcohol addiction, which is responsible for 100,000 deaths a year?

Well, the message I get is that Clinton wants to look tough on drugs,
sympathetic to youth, and stay on the good side of TV networks, which earn
$626 million a year in revenues from beer ads.

Now broadcasters are going to be making almost that much from anti-drug
ads, with no mention of alcohol as the most prevalent drug of all.

Well, that's not exactly right. TV is the most prevalent drug of all.

"What TV and drugs have in common is that they're what kids turn to when
they're bored," Wright said. "What kids need is after-school programs. If
the kids aren't busy, they turn to drugs."

The curious thing about this anti-drug media campaign is that it presumes
kids don't have anything better to do than watch TV, listen to radio or
surf the Internet. Or take drugs.

It doesn't actually give them anything better to do.

The president could have funded hundreds of Big Brother/Big Sister
Programs, which actually seem to keep at-risk kids off drugs and alcohol.
Yes, alcohol, too, something Clinton's media campaign won't mention, along
with tobacco.

Imagine bored kids' responses when they see anti-drug ads on TV between the
images of beautiful young people playing in the Rockies with Coors.

Kids are natural skeptics and will know that these anti-drug ads are just
the propaganda arm of a failed drug war.

Well, that's not what they'll say. They'll just say "bogus" or something
else beginning with B.

Many of these kids have been through the Drug Abuse Resistance Education
program. According to a federally funded study published in the American
Journal of Public Health in 1994, kids who went through DARE are no less
likely to say no to drugs than kids who had not gone through the program.
But adults like the illusion that they're doing something about drugs,
especially when so many adults don't really know what their own kids are
doing, or have much control over them.

They'll probably like the illusion that the president is doing something,
too, even though a series of presidents have failed in fighting drugs.

The statistics are amazing, considering all the "just say no" and all the
films of DEA agents making busts.

Ninety-seven percent of high school seniors say marijuana is easy to
obtain. Half the kids in America have tried it; however, only 5 percent of
them go on to serious drug problems.

Clinton is wasting huge amounts of taxpayers' money blanketing the airwaves
and cyberspace to reach kids who will have no problems with drugs, while
leaving the ones with real problems to go without guidance or treatment. Of
course, he will reach all the voters.

1998 San Francisco Examiner

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski