Shock Tactics and Saturation Ads:

HOW A TYCOON IS TAKING ON CRYSTAL METH

A $4.5m Campaign Has Certainly Raised Awareness, but Critics Say The
Hysteria Is Ill-Judged

Travelling through the big sky country of Montana in the north-western
US it is hard to believe that anything could be awry. Piebald ponies
graze in their pastures, deer munch grass by the side of the road, and
people are few and far between. But a series of billboards are
disfiguring the views of the Rockies.

In one, a bloodied young man stares arrogantly at the camera.
"Actually, doing meth won't make it easier to hook up," reads the
slogan. Another shows a gouged back, with the words: "Scabs, boils and
body sores. Then things really go downhill." In a third, a close-up of
a woman's mouth showing rotting teeth and scabbed lips smeared with
blood, the slogan reads: "You'll never worry about lipstick on your
teeth again."

The billboards went up last month, along with TV and radio ads. The
Montana Meth Project's aim is to warn of the dangers of
methamphetamine and it is leaving little to chance. The $4.5m (UKP2.5m)
campaign is the biggest in Montana, with ads on primetime TV, in
cinemas, on almost every billboard in the state and in rotation on
radio stations.

A $4.5m campaign for a state with a population under 1 million may
seem excessive, but to the man bankrolling it, it is barely
sufficient. "The word 'drug' is not incendiary enough. This stuff is
unbelievable." Tom Siebel sold his software company, Siebel Systems,
last year for $5.8bn and has an estimated personal fortune of $1.6bn.

He heard about the state's methamphetamine problem from two friends in
law enforcement. Montana, like other rural western states, is seeing
communities ravaged by methamphetamine use.

Methamphetamine, a potent form of amphetamine, was first synthesised
in Japan in 1919. Allied and Axis troops were given meth in the second
world war, and by the 1950s it was prescribed to American women as a
dietary aid, to combat depression and as an energy boost. But after it
was criminalised, production moved underground and purity was
diminished. Now production is dominated by Mexican drug cartels.

But it was the ease of producing meth that in part prompted its rise
in rural areas. Fertiliser, household chemicals and pseudoephedrine, a
common nasal decongestant, together with tubing and a gas stove are
all that is needed to make meth, which is snorted, smoked or injected.
While lawmakers focused on heroin and cocaine, methamphetamine quietly
took over the west.

Effective Spending

"When you're thinking about philanthropy you're thinking about areas
where you might accomplish something and have some leverage," Siebel
says. "A lot of philanthropic acts are akin to boiling the ocean. But
I thought, gee, maybe there's a chance to do something."

He realised that for relatively little money he could saturate Montana
with anti-meth advertising. The results have been impressive, with the
campaign raising awareness among 90% of respondents to the project's
own survey.

The approach is familiar in the UK, particularly from the anti-heroin
campaigns of the late 80s. Siebel even recruited Tony Kaye, a veteran
of British advertising, who now lives in Los Angeles. "It's
film-making on a microscopic level," Kaye says of the 30-second
commercials. "The fact that these commercials will be running in
primetime will be quite a shock. The American public is not used to
seeing this on their TV in a commercial break, although television and
real life are full of it."

The ads have high production values. "I wish my tyre had blown out
that night," says a female voice as a car speeds across the screen
before crashing and rolling. The young bleeding woman is glimpsed
through a smashed car window. "But I didn't crash," she continues. "I
drove to that party and did meth for the first time. And now this is
my life." Viewers then see an image of the prematurely aged woman as a
meth addict.

Another ad shows a young woman at a party, asking friends if she can
have some of what they're having. "You want meth?" says a man. "Here's
your meth. And your meth dealer. And your meth boyfriends. And your
meth baby. And don't forget your meth face." He holds a mirror up to
her now ravaged face.

The ads are powerful. But are they not a little far-fetched, with
their promise of bad skin, bad teeth and an imminent inability to
perform housework calling to mind not only the anti-heroin campaigns
of the 80s but the descent into debauchery promised by the 1936
anti-marijuana classic Reefer Madness?

Carren Clen started taking meth at 17 and within six months had cut
her parents out of her life and was prostituting herself to fund her
drug habit. "When I first saw those ads I remember feeling like I was
going to throw up, it's almost like flashbacks," she says. Now 22, she
came off meth when the supply dried up in her part of Montana. She
joined a detox programme and now works as a manager in Yellowstone
national park.

"I'll try anything once, twice if I like it," says Jen Hedges, 28. She
tried meth when she was 26, old for a first-time user. "It is very
intense," she says. "It wakes you up, you're invincible, cocky,
opinionated." Although she was not instantly hooked - it was three
months before her second hit - Hedges was soon using the drug every
day. When police found meth in her car, she went to jail, losing her
job, her home and custody of her eight-year-old son.

"My teeth are a little bit messed up and I'll never be able to fix
them," she says. Users frequently suffer from "methmouth": the drug
dries the mouth causing users to grind their teeth.

For the Montana attorney general, Mike McGrath, the worry is rising
crime, child neglect and the prison population. There are no reliable
measures of the number of addicts or of the role of meth in crime, but
McGrath is clear there is a serious problem. "We've had growing meth
problems here for the last 10 to 15 years," he says. "We worked very
hard to bring awareness of the problem to rural communities but
frankly they were in a state of denial. Now, with this campaign,
awareness levels are huge."

Diverted Resources

Federal authorities have belatedly started to take an interest: the
Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which will devote more than $100m
to fighting the drug, has come into force. Several states, including
Montana, have banned unregistered sales of pseudoephedrine.

McGrath admits that the focus on meth is diverting resources from
other priorities, and critics suggest that the hysteria over the
latest US "epidemic" is ill-judged. After all, what happened to the
other epidemics threatening society - the crack craze, PCP, GHB?

What reliable figures there are show that while treatment of meth
addicts has gone up, US meth use has, if anything, declined slightly
in the past two to three years. This could suggest that existing
addicts find it easier to seek treatment, or that the statistics are
lagging behind.

"Look," says Tom Siebel, "there are drugs and then there is meth.
People can live and function and occasionally do marijuana and cocaine
without destroying their lives ... We've all been there. You're
somewhere you shouldn't be, you've had six beers. All we're saying is,
if you're going to make a bad choice, make some other bad choice."