CANADA'S RUDIMENTARY APPROACH TO 'UNSELLING' DRUGS

Nancy Reagan would be horrified. Almost 30 years ago, when a young
California schoolgirl asked the U.S. First Lady what advice she would
offer to help kids resist the pressure of peers to take drugs, she
replied: "Just say no."

Since then, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars trying
to deter its citizens from using illegal drugs, with uneven success.
But one hard-hitting effort, using the same techniques as any consumer
marketing campaign, has been so successful that it has drawn attention
from around the world and even helped shape the Canadian government's
first anti-drug campaign since the early 1990s.

Over the past five years, Montana has gained a dubious international
fame, becoming known as a hotbed of methamphetamine use but also as
the place where a national battle against the drug got a toehold, with
a series of graphic ads so powerful they were banned from daytime television.

In 2005, Thomas Siebel, a software billionaire who has a home in
Montana, felt compelled to do something about the growing use of meth,
which by some estimates was responsible for more than 80 per cent of
the prison population in the rural state and half of the foster care
population. Using millions of dollars of his own money, he founded the
Montana Meth Project, which conducted months of original field
research that sought the opinions and attitudes of non-users and
addicts alike.

In September of that year, the MMP hit the air with its first wave of
TV ads developed by the hot San Francisco agency Venables Bell &
Partners. The goal? To "unsell" meth.

The project went to market with saturation coverage, ensuring 70 to 90
per cent of Montana teens would be exposed to one of its ads three to
five times a week on TV alone, as well as radio, print and the
Internet. For years, the Meth Project was the state's largest advertiser.

The ads were impossible to ignore. The first wave comprised four
spots, all targeting those who might consider using meth for the first
time. In one, which plays like a horror film, a girl taking a shower
screams as she sees a future version of herself crouching in the
corner of the tub, scarred and bleeding. Her junkie self moans, "Don't
do it."

Another follows the insistent refrain of a girl at each successive
step down her spiralling path of drug use: "I'm gonna try meth just
once," she says, taking a hit from friends. "I'm gonna smoke this just
once; I'm gonna steal just once." Walking away from the camera with a
man at a party, she says, "I'm going to sleep with him for meth just
once." The spot ends with her passed out, her face full of scars, as
her younger sister looks to the camera and says: "I'm going to try
meth just once."

"We decided to approach it as a consumer product," explains Nitsa
Zuppas, the executive director of the Siebel Foundation, which backs
the Meth Project. "When somebody said to a kid, 'Hey, give it a try,'
at that moment, we wanted them to be really educated consumers."

Recognizing teens would reject anything that felt like a lecture from
authority figures, the Montana efforts seem to take place in a Charlie
Brown universe, practically devoid of adults. The research, says Ms.
Zuppas, was clear. "They wanted the facts. They didn't want to be
talked down to. They wanted to hear from their peers," she said.

The project tapped some high-profile film directors for the TV spots,
all of whom know their way around emotional manipulation, including
Tony Kaye (American History X), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, the
drug addiction film Requiem for a Dream), and Alejandro Gonzalez
Inarritu (Babel), as well as the acclaimed cinematographer Wally
Pfister (The Dark Knight).

Like any long-term advertising effort directed at consumers, the
Montana Meth Project was conceived as a series of campaigns that built
upon each other. The first two waves, rolled out within a year,
focused on the damage that meth can do to users themselves. The third
and fourth waves expanded the drug's blast radius, looking at its
toxic effects on the relationships between users and their friends and
loved ones.

Each spot in the fifth wave, which rolled out last month, begins with
horrific depictions of the behaviour of some users (self-mutilation,
prostitution), then ends with a focus on the burden of guilt absorbed
by those who are left behind.

The campaign, which includes on-the-ground community involvement, is
widely credited with decreasing teen meth use in the state by up to 63
per cent. And though some studies have questioned that data, the
campaign was adopted by seven other states that were struggling with
their own blossoming meth epidemic. Calls came in from around the
world, including New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. The annual
budget for the National Meth Project, a public-private partnership, is
now in the range of $30-million (U.S.).

But when officials at Health Canada began to formulate their own
anti-drug campaign two years ago, showing focus groups of 13- to
15-year-olds 10 ads from Britain, Australia and the Montana Meth
Project, they found the U.S. messages didn't resonate.

"A lot of the kids, it was more marijuana and ecstasy that they were
experimenting with," noted Jane Hazel, the director general in the
marketing and communication services directorate of Health Canada.
"They thought, 'Meth? Oh, I wouldn't really get that bad.' They found
that too over the top."

Also, while hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on
anti-drug advertising every year in the United States, that
advertising category has been all but silent in Canada since the last
such ads ran 17 years ago. The national conversations were entirely
different.

"Canadians hadn't been exposed to any advertising like this in so
long, and a lot of the [foreign] campaigns were the product of people
being exposed over time. They were in a different place, I think, so
we had to kind of go back to basics," Ms. Hazel said.

Which is why Canadians are seeing what is, by international standards,
a campaign of rudimentary creative. Transit ads include a marijuana
cigarette and the tagline: "Drugs, Not 4 Me." The website not4me.ca,
hosted by Health Canada, bears the same Web 1.0 aesthetic of most of
the federal government's clunky Internet offerings.

And in sharp contrast with the U.S. commercials, which were a
parent-free zone, the single television spot in the Canadian campaign
depicts a teen boy who goes to a party and, offered a toke, flashes
forward in his mind to the imagined consequences: ecstasy use, fights
with his mother, falling asleep in class and getting caught by a
grown-up with drugs that fall out of his school locker.

Still, the Canadian strategy seems to be resonating: Hundreds of
people have posted their own stories of drug abuse on the site, and
the campaign is about to roll out a social media effort. Funding is
thin, though: The federal government has committed a mere $30-million
over five years, leaving no money for the creation of another TV spot
- - which, as any advertiser can tell you, means that the campaign is
likely going to get very old very fast.