DRUG WARS' SUPER SUNDAY

This year's fictitious Bud Bowl has a different match-up: Instead of a
tussle between animated helmet-wearing Budweiser bottles and its
arch-rival Bud Light, the company will be taking on a real world rival
- - a White House that claims drinking leads to drug use.

Over the past twenty years, since what AdWeek.com calls the
"electrifying introduction of Apple's Macintosh which transformed the
final showdown of the football season into the greatest advertising
event of the year," the National Football League's Super Bowl has
become Super Sunday for advertising agencies and multinational
corporations. Nearly as remarkable as the game itself are the
advertisements which keep some viewers from hitting their remotes,
especially during one-sided games like last year's Tampa Bay
Buccaneers' rout of the Oakland Raiders.

Major advertisers understand that edgy, innovative and occasionally
wicked ads create buzz, and buzz makes the $2.3 million they're paying
for a 30-second spot worthwhile. Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based
brewer of Budweiser Beer, "the game's exclusive national beer sponsor
for more than a decade" has purchased ten 30-second spots, AdWeek.com
reported. Sony will have nine spots aired during the multi-hour
pre-game show, and America Online, FedEx, and Frito-Lay are also on
board. Pizza Hut will use pop-star Jessica Simpson and the Muppets to
kick off a $50 million campaign aimed at encouraging families to
"gather 'round the good stuff." Also touting "the good stuff" are Eli
Lilly and Icos Corp., GlaxoSmithKline and Bayer, and Pfizer, all
makers of erectile-dysfunction drugs.

Leaving no drug-war advertising opportunity behind, John Walters'
White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) will be
encouraging people to stay away from the "good stuff" during the
premiere of its latest advertising campaign which launches on Super
Bowl Sunday; a campaign that for the first time "subtly" makes the
connection between drinking and drug use.

Ironically, the unveiling of the most recent ONDCP's campaign against
marijuana comes on the heels of a recently released study concluding
that the White House's anti-drug campaigns have had little impact on
American teenagers, its primary target, and news that two employees of
the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather were indicted by a federal
grand jury on charges they were defrauding the government in
connection with their work for the White House drug office.

The report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) - part of
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - was conducted
jointly by the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Westat, a 30-year-old research firm
in Rockville, Md. It covered anti-drug advertising campaigns conducted
between September 1999 and June 2003 and recognized that "there is
little evidence of direct favorable [advertising] campaign effects on
youth."

According to AdWeek.com, the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy "links drug use with drinking ... for the first time
in the campaign's five-year history." While the ads will be previewed
a few days before the Super Bowl, AdWeek.com reports that one ad
targeting parents will be shown on the Super Bowl telecast and the
other, aimed at teens, will be shown during the opening episode of
"Survivor: All Stars" premiering after the big game.

The advertisements, produced by New York companies Foote Cone &
Belding and Ogilvy & Mather, "also promotes the concept of 'early
intervention,'" a theory favored by drug czar John Walters. "The
campaign enlists the power of peers and parents of teens to take early
action against youth drug use and will provide information and support
to help get their friends or children to stop using illicit drugs,"
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said in a statement.

Here is how AdWeek.com describes the Foote Cone & Belding ad entitled
"Rewind," which will air during the game:

"The story unfolds in reverse chronological order, not unlike the
movie Memento. The viewer first sees a girl passed out on a couch. The
scene flashes to her vomiting in a urinal. Subsequent scenes show her
getting high and drinking from a red cup at a party. She then appears
at school with friends, on the school bus and back at home. At that
point, which is the 'beginning' of the story, the girl's mother has a
chance to intervene. 'We've got to talk,' she says, holding up a bag
of marijuana.

While "Rewind" doesn't "explicitly mention alcohol...[it] 'subtly'
makes the association between drinking and drug use.... The ad is
intended to show parents of teens who drink and smoke pot that they
have an opportunity to halt the problem before their children become
hard-core drug users. 'It is not an anti-drinking spot,'" a source
told AdWeek.com.

The second 30-second ad, produced by Ogilvy & Mather and set to run on
Survivor, is "targeted at friends of teens who drink and use drugs."
It deals with "the responsibility a friend or loved one has toward
someone who has a drug or drinking problem. The spot depicts "what
would happen in a lake where you might have a responsibility to do
something."

The new ads appear to be folding Bush's drug wars into his faith-based
initiative. Last year, at a press conference surrounded by Christian,
Jewish and Islamic community leaders, Walters said: "Faith plays an
important role when it comes to teen marijuana prevention. We are
urging youth ministers, volunteers and faith leaders to integrate drug
prevention messages and activities into their sermons and youth
programming and are providing them with key tools and resources to
make a difference.

At the time, Walters was announcing the launch of a new campaign
called "Faith. The Anti-Drug," which indicated that the drug czar was
turning down the volume from earlier anti-marijuana ad campaigns
focusing on teens that linked the use of marijuana to the funding of
terrorist organizations and support for terrorism.

"The reality is a lot of people don't know how to talk about these
issues," said Jim Towey, the Director of the White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "According to data from
Monitoring the Future, 90 percent of teens in the U.S. are affiliated
with a religious denomination and 43 percent of eighth graders attend
religious services weekly. Churches, temples and mosques are well
positioned to cultivate anti-drug values and teach effective coping
tools to deal with negative peer pressure."

Team Bush anti-drug policy encouraging intervention was spelled out in
2002. When President Bush announced his National Drug Control
Strategy, FY-2003, "compassionate coercion" was the term coined and
touted as a key element for success. Under the heading "Healing
America's Drug Users" a White House fact sheet stated: "Getting people
into treatment - including programs that call upon the power of faith
- - will require us to create a new climate of 'compassionate coercion,'
which begins with family, friends, employers, and the community.
Compassionate coercion also uses the criminal justice system to get
people into treatment."

ONDCP ads are nothing if not memorable. Who can forget the message:
"This is your brain on drugs," while eggs sizzle in a frying pan. And
during 2002's Super Bowl the Bush Administration's $3.5 million ad buy
played the Osama card, attempting to link the "war on terrorism" to
the "war on drugs."

Entitled "Evaluation of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign:
2003 Report of Findings," the National Institute on Drug Abuse report
points out that although the advertising campaigns have had a
"favorable effect" on parents, children - whose illicit drug use is
the focus of the ads - pay them little mind.

NIDA's controversial findings were compounded by reports that
congressional critics "have questioned both the ads effectiveness and
the use of Ogilvy, which [in 2002] ... settled for $1.8 million civil
charges that it over-billed the government for its ad work on the
anti-drug account," AdAge.com recently reported.

In September, the National Academy of Sciences released a study "that
called for the inclusion of alcohol in the anti-drug campaign,"
according to AdWeek.com. "Parents tend to dramatically underestimate
underage drinking generally and their own children's drinking in
particular," the study said. "The beer and liquor industries have long
opposed any inclusion of alcohol messages in the [anti-drug] campaign,
on the basis that responsible drinking - unlike drug use - is legal
for adults."