DO DRUG ADS WORK? YOU MUST BE HIGH, TEENS SAY

Rolling in a low-rider, three guys stop at a-drive-through, cutting up and
smoking dope.

A little girl innocently pedals by.

The scene plays again. The girl pedals.

The third time the potheads pull away with their order. There's a screech.
And a thump.

The girl is hit.

The message, according to the Partnership for A Drug-Free America, shows
the dangers of marijuana.

Yet when the ad, part of a new national anti-marijuana campaign, was
mentioned to a room full of members of the Herald-Leader Teen Board, they
didn't cringe.

They laughed.

"Those ads are pointless," said Bennett Craig, a freshman at Paul Laurence
Dunbar High School. "It's just stupid."

The drive-through ad and others in that campaign, which started being
broadcast after the Super Bowl, haven't been formally critiqued. But a
government-sponsored review of current anti-marijuana campaigns conducted
by the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania
suggested that Bennett's attitude might not be unusual.

"There is little evidence of direct favorable campaign on youth," the
report said. "Contrarily, there are some unfavorable trends in youth
anti-marijuana beliefs."

Shortly after the study came out in early April, the Office of National
Drug Control Policy canceled any further evaluations of the program by the
Annenberg group.

"There is largely a mythology that nothing is working," said Howard Simon,
spokesman for the Partnership for A Drug-Free America.

He said some of the theoretical basis for the study, which was in its fifth
year, was flawed, and that's why it was discontinued.

Another study, well known in scholarly circles, also has shown a mixed
success of the anti-marijuana message.

A Mixed Message

The messages have been pounded into the public consciousness since 1987,
when the nation was shown that your brain on drugs is like an egg in a
frying pan. Yet, marijuana has remained the most widely used drug among
middle school and high school students in the 27 years that University of
Michigan researchers have tracked drug use and attitudes toward users.

Marijuana use bottomed out at 22 percent in 1992, down from a high of 51
percent in 1979, the Michigan study shows. But throughout the 1990s,
marijuana use rose, and it has hovered between 35 percent and 40 percent
since 1996.

In some schools, the numbers seem higher.

"Everybody is just swamped in pot all the time," Emily Grise, a junior at
Lafayette High School, said during the Teen Board discussion.

"It's not just your school," added Jay Springate, a senior at Anderson
County High School.

Teens also agreed with another finding of the research: Despite efforts to
highlight the dangers and consequences of marijuana, the number of those
who see marijuana use as a risky behavior has gone down along with rates of
disapproval of people who indulge.

"I can't really name somebody who hasn't smoked pot," said Rachel Hollars,
a Bourbon County High School junior.

"It's not a big deal anymore. It's kind of common now," said Megan Hooper,
a junior at Lexington Catholic.

Some grown-ups agree.

Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, a non-profit
lobbying group that supports decriminalization, said public service
announcements are a waste of time and money.

"Most of them, frankly, strike me as being pretty absurd," he said. "We
keep saying we have a war on drugs. I don't think it's working."

Tough Assignment

Lewis Donohew, a University of Kentucky researcher who has extensively
studied public service announcements, said public service announcements can
work if they are created with ample research as to what will speak to teens.

Donohew said teen-agers who are drawn to drug use tend to be risk takers,
and ads must be jarring enough to appeal to them.

"In order to have an effect, you have to attract the attention and hold it
long enough for the persuasive message to go through," he said.

But, he said, "it does very little good to scare them to death if you can't
tell them something to do about it."

Simon, spokesman for the Partnership for A Drug-Free America, said his
group has been focusing on harsher ads that show the extremes of what could
happen when you smoke marijuana. In addition to the drive-through ad, there
is one that features a boy accidentally shooting his friend with a gun, and
another in which a girl has sex with a boy when she is high, although she
turned him down before partaking of marijuana.

But all of those scenarios struck Teen Board members as sometimes comical
rather than startling.

Meanwhile, marijuana use in some parts of the state might be on the decline.

William Banks, a senior at Whitesburg High School in Eastern Kentucky, said
he-doesn't see that much marijuana use among his peers.

"Why smoke pot," he said, "when you can get OxyContin?"