DRUG MONEY (continued from part 1 at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98/n000/a03.html )

ONDCP STRATEGY

The ONDCP strategy involves a three phase effort; the first, having begun in January and still running, is a 12-city test of $20 million in paid anti-drug ads, during which the office is evaluating its tactics based on focus groups, phone interviews and community feedback. That said, one high-ranking executive involved in the program terms it superficial at best. Phase Two expands the campaign nationally, with $65 million in paid ads starting in May or June. Phase Three, which starts in the fall, allocates $93 million in paid integrated media.

The integrated media plan, as with any brand image push these days, is to get the money "to look bigger" than what the paid and donated media time adds up to, this through high-impact media, sports and entertainment events and "non-traditional" media such as video trailers, video-store handouts, mall arcades and even basketball backboards. The idea is to create an "effective, continuous presence" for the messages, said Michael Marks, senior vice president of Creative Media, N.Y. "We have to keep hammering the message home, just like the Nike swoosh," said Judy Cushing, president of National Family Partnership, Portland, Ore., an organization of concerned parents.

For Phase 1, being implemented by Porter Novelli, Washington, ads encompass five strategic themes, based on study of academic papers, data and other research material supplied by the PDFA, as well as on two two-day conferences of ad people, physicians and public health experts:

1. Instill belief that drug use is not common; that kids overestimate the prevalence of use. Debunk the myth that everyone is doing it to keep kids from trying in the first place. [ "Four out of five kids don't smoke pot."]

2. Enhance negative social consequences of use. [Girl storming out of pothead ex-boyfriend's room.]

3. The positive aspects of being drug-free. [Bad skateboarder in action.]

4. Enhance the variety of personal and social skills. Yes, refusal skills, but also future-oriented skills needed to have a bright future. [I need to graduate, I need to have fun, I need a job, I need to be a kid.]

5. Positive use of time. [Girl winning first-place in a gymnastics meet.]

Are they on target?

"This is your brain on drugs" is the best recalled anti-drug ad in the history of the genre; a new ad has extended that equity, showing a woman in a kitchen holding up an egg, "This is your brain," and smashing the egg with a frying pan, "This is your brain on heroin." She then ransacks the rest of the room with the cast-iron pan to show the devastation that heroin wreaks on home, career and family. Another ad shows a middle-aged mother feeding someone, presumably a baby, oatmeal by spoon. The payoff is that she's actually feeding her teenage son whose brain has been fried by inhaling household chemicals.

While ad agencies' good intentions are as true as any other partner in the mix, most are also too taxed to put the same level of rigorous research and account planning into a PDFA ad that they might for a paying client. If they do read the research, chances are it's supplied by the PDFA. Most agencies, in fact, view the experience as merely a creative exercise in the name of good citizenry. But a lack of the checks and balances proper research can provide may lead to work that, while creative, can hinder the desired effect.

A 1996 ad by agency Hampel Stefanides, N, Y,, used a young woman's account of her and her boyfriend's heroin addiction. Parents to an infant, he succumbed to an overdose, and the young mother called for help. She quite credibly says she lost custody of her baby and wails, "I'm not allowed to see her." Problem is, the scene runs counter to social work theory and practice in just about any U.S. jurisdiction, Addicted parents are encouraged, even required, to visit their children in foster care; failure to do so is a good way to permanently lose custody. Hampel Stefanides creative director Dean Stefanides said the story line was deliberately "fuzzy," so as to protect any real addicts' identity.

"No one knows what's made up or not," Stefanides said. "If it's incorrect, it's all done to have kids stay off drugs. Maybe there should be more research."

He referred other questions to the ad's director, Bobby Sheehan of Pure Film. "I don't make documentaries," Sheehan said. "I make film stories. The intention is not to deceive, but hopefully to make a dramatic point."

Which might be fine, except that the hyperbole seems to be taking on a life of its own. In a recent Newsday op-ed item, Steven Donziger, policy director of the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information, recalled one PDFA newspaper ad that claimed "20% of all children have tried an inhalant by the eighth grade." First, Donziger quotes a 1996 U.S. Health and Human Services survey that only 5.9% of children aged 12- 17 had ever tried an inhalant. Second, he states, the "everybody's-doing-it" tagline "virtually invitees] children to try inhalants."

Another critic, Kendra Wright of Falls Church Va.-based Family Watch, a network of organizations concerned about drug policy, said one ad she saw in the Washington test area worries her. "My 15-year-old step-son had no idea that you could get high on household cleaners until he saw the ad warning against their use."

One anti-heroin ad, according to critics, may have simply compounded problems for one of the campaign's target markets. The TV spot features a teenage boy decrying the drug's destruction of his life, from unemployment to homelessness to what's presented as the extreme degradation: "...and now I have sex with men for money to support my drug habit." This stirred the ire of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), which called the ad "patently homophobic." GLAAD maintained the act used "homosexuality as a scare tactic" and potentially "exacerbate [d] higher-than-average risks gay and lesbian youth face for substance abuse and suicide by implying that being gay is worse than being addicted to heroin." Once the civil rights watchdog group started whipping up a protest campaign, PDFA agreed to excise the offending portions of the commercial.

Finally, the most famous PDFA mistake involved the brain wave supposedly of a pot smoker. It turned out the flat line was either that of a coma patient, or the monitor just wasn't hooked up to anyone. Accounts differ, Either way, these sorts of misguided efforts undercut the PDFA's effectiveness.
"Like most pro bono groups, the PDFA won't do disaster checks on rough cuts or the finished ads," said Harvard's DeJong. He feels the PDFA needs more input from behavioral scientists who know how to translate public health theory into messages that produce behavioral change, "But the PDFA is resistant, they want to restrict it to advertising folks," he said.

Vermont's Worden agrees. A behavioral scientist might better gauge if an ad is too abstract for a particular age. One ad in particular, which shows a good-looking boy on a skateboard head across his comfy suburb to share a joint with a friend, would've been flagged by a good public health maven, Worden said. "That's just too much modeling of the activity in too attractive a way," he said.

PDFA's creative chief Doria Steedman said focus group testing of finished ads is now being done, and retorts that her organization gets all the advice it can from everyone it can. "It's not done by two guys sitting around a room," she said.

ZERO TOLERANCE

Another big area of credibility with the youth audience is the program's focus on marijuana as a gateway drug to more serious abuse, long a puritan mantra but hardly an established fact. Public health experts, including Dr. Johnston's research, say that approximately 18% of youth who try marijuana go on to more serious drugs.

"Pot is hardest [of drugs to depict] because it's so accepted, so normalized," said the ONDCP senior advisor Alan Levitt. "It's given a wink and a nod in society. Kids see ballplayers getting caught smoking marijuana and not suffering any real consequences. We need to depict that four out of five don't use it."

Still, the basic consideration of how many kids start substance abuse with alcohol, especially beer and tobacco, before they get near their first joint, raises a huge issue: Whether a zero-tolerance position is tenable, when ad dollars might be spent on warnings against more addictive, more lethal drugs, and especially when the communication of a zero-tolerance message comes off as wantonly puritanical in the viewer's eyes, poisoning the well for the entire campaign. A report sponsored by the Ford Foundation debunks educational efforts "emphasizing the horrors of addiction and lumping all drugs together as leading to the same ultimate doom. Virtually all experts now agree that such tactics have not proved effective. Indeed, in many cases, they have been counterproductive, causing disrespect, skepticism and resistance to all advice on drugs."

The PDFA and ONDCP are on a mission to, as Professor Johnston phrases it, get the country speaking in one voice in the fight against drugs. The words and images that copywriters and strategists use are crucial in the process. Even ONDCP director McCaffrey has conceded, despite his Army background, that we need to stop calling the fight "A War on Drugs," as if it could be won like a methodical military campaign. In fact, in his recent PBS documentary, Addiction, Bill Moyers took McCaffrey's lead and compared the "war" on drugs to the quagmire of Vietnam.

Though it undoubtedly took a lot of manhours to create the mammoth advertising program to come, it has not been hard to generate the necessary backing for the cause. Who, after all, could be against keeping more children from damaging themselves with drugs? It is in such a consensus-filled rose garden, though, that short-cuts can be taken and dissenting opinions quashed.

Why, for example, aren't beer, liquor and tobacco included in the PDFA's and ONDCP's mandate, when, historically, youth are curious about and start out on those substances before they try marijuana or are tempted by their first mushrooms. Add to that the hundreds of millions of dollars a year spent by advertisers of those products to reach kids, and it's hard to justify their exclusion. But then, this is where the moral high-road runs smack into the rocky cliff of political pragmatism.

"To include them [tobacco and alcohol], the program wouldn't have gotten through Congress," said the ONDCP's Levitt. "Plus, with the amount of money we have to spend, it would have dissipated our message. It's not in our mandate."

By not including them, for whatever reason, the effectiveness of the campaign may be weakened. But it only further blurs a picture already made fuzzy by a dearth of sound research and, thus, the most basic "account supervision." This anti-drug effort may well be the model for other public causes co-funded by the public and private sectors, and it could prove a poor precedent.

But marketing, if even better conceived and implemented, is obviously no panacea. It starts with family and a kid's environment, and those issues are less of the Wonder World of commercial culture than of the fabric of society. "Prevention experts say we must acknowledge why people are drawn to mind-altering substances," said Harvard's DeJong. "It flies in the face of their experience to not talk about this."

"What works is parents," said drug counselor Mary Dailey, student assistance coordinator at New Trier High School in Wimmetka, Ill. "Fear of parental disapproval, parents talking repeatedly and imposing consequences. Parents need to monitor their kids and wait up for them to come home. They need to know who their friends are, and their friends' parents. And most of all, they need to be role models themselves."

In the end, the question of whether or not ads work to deter drug use seems an unwieldy one to answer despite the certainty expressed – if not proved – by the PDFA and ONDCP. Doubters like Berkeley's Wallack claim the campaign thus far does little more than raise awareness of the issue of drug use. "They take a complex, multi-causal problem and reduce it to a matter of the wrong decisions, without going into causes," he said.

Of course, one might argue that such rhetorical reduction is what advertising does. And some might argue back, that might be the first impetus for more scrutiny of this expensive crusade.

Daniel Hill is a New York-based freelancer who writes on social policy issues.