BY JENNIFER NIX

You may have noticed that everyone on ABC seems obsessed with drugs these
days from Peter Jennings to Drew Carey. This isn't a coincidence: In
conjunction with the Partnership for a DrugFree America, ABC has launched
what it calls its "March Against Drugs" an unprecedented monthlong
antidrug media blitz drawing in "every corner of the network: news,
entertainment, sports and advertising."

During the campaign, at least one antidrug ad produced either by the
Partnership or by ABC will air every network hour of every day
throughout the entire month. All regular ABC news programs will air
drugcrisis reports, and the network has scheduled a number of news
specials as well. Drugrelated story lines are being incorporated into all
daytime and evening television programs, from sitcoms to soaps, and even
"Wide World of Sports" announcers are citing the problems wrought by
illegal drugs. PDFA's tollfree telephone number beckons viewers to call
its office for further information and ABC's Web site links viewers
straight to the Partnership's home page.

ABC considers this media blitz to be essentially a public service
announcement writ large. But critics charge that the network has
effectively put its weight behind a bankrupt antidrug approach by choosing
to join forces only with the increasingly controversial PDFA. Rather than
making a real difference, they say, ABC will accomplish little more than
pushing useless, feelgood propaganda into the homes of some 142 million
viewers.

"There is no credible scientific evidence that 'zerotolerance' drug
education works, and that is what the PDFA ads are based on," says Dr. Joel
Brown, director of Educational Research Consultants in Berkeley, Calif.
Brown and his team conducted the fouryear Drug, Alcohol and Tobacco
Education, or "DATE," evaluation for the California Department of
Education. His research leads Brown to believe that kids don't take the
PDFA ads seriously.

"In the absence of any real evidence, as even the government's own General
Accounting Office report concluded in 1991, it's wrongheaded to continue
pouring millions of dollars into only zerotolerance approaches for kids,"
Brown says.

The PDFA, of course, disagrees. "We know advertising works. It can convince
you to buy a new car, or a certain brand," PDFA public relations director
Stephen Dnistrian said last month in his wellordered Chrysler Building
office. "It can convince kids that drugs are dangerous." From PDFA's hefty
press kit, Dnistrian pulls favorable statistics from a Johns Hopkins study
on the impact of antidrug advertising. "A majority" of the 837 students
included in the study were found to have felt "they gained stronger beliefs
about the dangers of drugs."

It's not clear what effect these "stronger beliefs" have in the real world.
Over the last 10 years, more than 250 advertising agencies have created
over 600 antidrug ads for the PDFA. Those commercials have aired on all
three networks, reaching what Dnistrian calls a "peak media saturation
level" in 1991 at $365 million in probono support. Figures show that by
1996, support had dropped but was still providing some $260 million a
year. Despite this campaign, teen drug use remains on the rise, and many
drug abuse experts have begun to question the zerotolerance approach.

Don't try telling that to the folks at ABC, though, which is itself pouring
the equivalent of many tens of millions of dollars into the March campaign.
"If we were just going to sell the time allotted to the public service
announcements we'll be running," ABC spokesperson Janice Gretemeyer
estimates, "those spots would go for in excess of $15 million."

The March campaign had its origins last summer between the government's
release of a report showing teen drug use on the rise and the November
votes in California and Arizona to legalize marijuana for medicinal use.
All the influence and money poured into "Just Say No" and eggs in frying
pans was proving to have little to no lasting, or attributable, effect.
Nearly $3 billion in probono services and prime media placement has been
at PDFA'a disposal since 1987, and these elite information officers in the
War on Drugs didn't want to admit they'd failed in their mission. So they
circled the wagons.

"You see, drug use among teens has doubled since 1991 and that's when we,
here at the Partnership, started to see a dropoff in commitment from the
media. We just weren't getting the saturation we needed for our ads to
work," the PDFA's Dnistrian says.

And so, last summer, PDFA Chairman James Burke and his wellheeled team
paid visits to all the networks. Burke's message found particularly fertile
soil the day he hit up ABC the network that has consistently run more
PDFA ads than all other networks combined. Most important was the reaction
from thenABC President David Westin, who said he was "startled" to learn
that kids are doing drugs. (In a press release, Westin said he had believed
"we were past that problem.") He decided then and there to heed the PDFA
battle call, and has become a vocal supporter of the campaign.

Indeed, just last week, moments before he was named the new president of
ABC News, the usually dashing Westin was unleashing a torrent of rage on
visitors to his office. Redfaced and with eyes bulging, Westin was
defending the "March Against Drugs" against criticisms from those visitors,
members of the group Partnership for Responsible Drug Information, who were
there to express their dismay at being denied participation in the campaign.

"The ads put out by PDFA have done nothing but interest more kids in trying
drugs. Their scare tactics are worse than ineffective they're
dangerous," says PRDI Chairman Thomas Haines, who also heads the
biochemistry department at the City University of New York's medical school.

He and his wife, Mary "Polly" Cleveland, research director for the
Schalkenbach Foundation, are at the center of PRDI's looseknit group of
roughly 100 academics, doctors and past and present political and law
enforcement officials. Their mission, members say, is to promote open and
honest discussion about drugs, and they deny accusations that they are for
drug legalization.

"Fair, balanced and responsible programming," Haines wrote in a February
letter to ABC, "would devote equal time to other views." He says his
overtures were "politely and lightly dismissed" until the 40minute session
with Westin last week when the "March" was well under way.

Another coalition including the American Civil Liberties Union, the
National Black Police Association and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
has also joined in the antiABC fray with its own letter to Westin. No. 1
on its list of concerns was the fact that, in following the PDFA's policy,
ABC will not air any antitobacco or antialcohol messages as part of the
campaign. The PDFA has received criticism in the past for accepting alcohol
money.

"Five hundred thousand people die each year from alcohol and tobacco ... 35
times the number of deaths from all illegal drugs combined," the letter
reads. "The implicit message sent to kids ... is that legal drugs are not
as harmful as illegal drugs a message compounded by the massive
advertising campaigns of the alcohol and tobacco industries."

ABC staff seem to be unaware that they've stepped right into the middle of
the war over controlling the drug policy debate. To Leslee Spoor, a news
division staffer now coordinating much of the "March Against Drugs" effort,
this is about parents talking to their kids about drugs.

"I don't see how anyone could be against it. We're just trying to get
people talking," she says.

She should know better than that. While folks on all sides of the drug
policy debate are quick to spew wildly spun scientific evidence, the fact
remains that there is a debate raging in this country over what to do about
illegal drugs. What PRDI et. al. are trying to make ABC realize is that in
joining forces only with the Partnership for a DrugFree America, the
network has now come down on just one side of a very fragmented issue.

And ABC has also committed its news department to something other than free
and fair reporting on the controversy. All of the ABC News programs, from
"Good Morning America" to "World News Tonight" will air drugabuse
specials, and Peter Jennings and network correspondents are starring in
several of the antidrug ads. On March 30, "ABC DDay," the network will
even fade to black for a period during a town hall meeting.

"I don't want a network to ram a particular point of view down my throat,"
Donna Leff, professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of
Journalism, complains. "A network's public service responsibility should be
about giving time to different points of view and letting the public decide.

"I'm also concerned about the way ABC plans to infuse drug themes into
their news coverage in much the same way as they will their soaps. There
doesn't seem to be a clear separation in this campaign between the news and
the network's message," says Leff.

Obviously, the drugs debate is a contentious one, and all sides feel their
answers will solve the drug crisis. Nevertheless, despite the fact that
groups like the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information are trying to
change the tone of drug education and media messages, the country is likely
to see more of the same.

Two weeks ago, when unveiling his Drug Control Strategy, President Clinton
announced that he had earmarked $175 million in government funds for
combating drugs through TV advertising.

The White House's "unofficial" partner? The Partnership for a DrugFree
America. March 12, 1997

Jennifer Nix is a writer in the New York area. Her work has appeared on
National Public Radio and in New York, the New York Observer and The Nation.

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