ANTI-DRUG CAMPAIGN MISSES MARK, SOME SAY

Smoke clouds the den as a teenage boy slouches back in an armchair, a bong
in one hand, his friend sitting across from him behind a desk swiveling
around in an office chair.

Times are good. They laugh, and talk about nothing urgent, just the normal
things teenagers chat about.

One pulls out a handgun and admires it. "Hey man, check this out," he says.

"Cool," his friend replies. "Is it loaded?"

"Nah."

Bang. Fade to black.

On the screen appears several words, and then a question: "Marijuana can
distort your sense of reality."

"Harmless?"

The commercial is just one of many that the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy is using in its campaign to curb drug use among youth
and encourage parent intervention. Other print, radio and television
advertisements link the drug to peer pressure, date rape, and even terrorism.

But the approach used by the multi-million dollar campaign -- $180 million
last year and $150 million this year -- discredits its message because the
commercials and advertisements are exaggerated and the statistics are
erroneously presented, especially when it comes to marijuana, said many
youth and professionals.

Maria Cunha of Potomac, a Winston Churchill High School senior, said she
understands the seriousness of marijuana, but does not believe the campaign
is effective.

"The commercials are hurting the message," said Cunha, 17. "I think it's
necessary to have those commercials, but they are too exaggerated. It does
make their message less likely to believe."

A Thomas S. Wootton High School senior, who asked to remain anonymous, said
he has smoked marijuana a few times with his friends, and the commercials
do not depict their behavior when they were high.

"It doesn't make you entirely that irresponsible," said the 17-year-old
from Potomac.

He said he finds humor in the commercials because they seem unrealistic.
"They're pretty funny and they're pretty strange," he said. "We just laugh
at them."

Who's using it?

The White House initiated the campaign in 1998 to educate 9- to
18-year-olds and their parents about drug use, and reduce the number of
people using drugs. The focus shifted last year to 14-year-olds and older
to target the age groups that use drugs more.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, marijuana is
the most widely used illegal drug in Maryland, and the nation.

In 2001, the most recent year for which figures are available, more than 12
million people age 12 and older in the United States used marijuana at
least once in the month before they were surveyed, according to the
institute. Of those surveyed, 56 percent used only marijuana and 20 percent
used marijuana with another illegal drug. Those figures have remained
fairly stable since 1999, according to the institute.

But the figures are not that clear, as different studies on marijuana use
contradict one another.

According to "Monitoring the Future," a 2001 study funded by the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, illicit drug use among eighth-, 10th- and
12th-graders saw little change from 2000 to 2001. According to the report,
marijuana use remained fairly stable, with 49 percent of 12th-graders using
the drug in 2001.

But according to the 2001 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse, funded
by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, marijuana use among
12- to 17-year-olds decreased by less than 1 percent between 1999 and 2000,
and increased by nearly 2 percent between 2000 and 2001.

David Maklan of Westat, a Rockville-based research company that evaluated
the campaign, said it is difficult to determine if the National Household
Survey of Drug Abuse reveals a significant change.

He said that although numbers in drug use have swayed, other factors beyond
the campaign could have played a role in the changes.

Overall, both studies agree that there has not been a decline in marijuana
use as a result of the campaign, Maklan said.

Reaction to the campaign

Rita Rumbaugh, a substances abuse prevention specialist for Montgomery
County Public Schools, said she acquired copies of the commercials last
fall to air on MCPS' cable channel. However, she said she is hesitant
because she feels some of the commercials are overdramatized, particularly
those relating drug use to terrorism. She said she plans to conduct a
student focus group to help determine if she should run the commercials.

"I thought they would see it as lame adults trying to shape kids'
behavior," Rumbaugh said. "I find them far-fetched myself."

Rumbaugh said commercials emphasizing low-academic achievement and
gang-related incidents would provide better examples of the effects of
marijuana use because they are real issues in public schools.

But Jennifer de Vallance, a spokeswoman for the White House Drug Policy
Office, disagreed.

She said the commercials portray incidences that could occur when under the
influence of marijuana. The examples in the campaign emphasize that
marijuana has proven to reduce reaction time and impair judgment. Those who
do not take the ads seriously are likely those who are lucky enough not to
have faced reality, she said.

Rachel Bensimon, a freshman at Winston Churchill High School, said the
commercials could be effective, depending on the audience. She said youths
who smoke marijuana may be harder to persuade because they already use the
drug without taking the risks seriously.

"I don't think they're funny," Bensimon said. "It depends who's watching.
It can be informative if they take it seriously."

The campaign's mixed results

The White House relies on surveys and studies on drug use and behavior, and
attitude trends toward drugs, to measure the campaign's success, said Brian
Blake, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

"Unfortunately, as with any ad campaign attempting to prevent or change
behavior, this is difficult to measure conclusively," Blake said.

The mixed results on marijuana use, and the inability to measure the
campaign's success, leave some critics wondering if the campaign is working
and is worth the millions of dollars spent on it.

"If they say there is no way that they can measure this, give me a break,"
said Bruce Mirken, spokesman for Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington
D.C.-based organization that opposes criminal penalties for marijuana.

Nevertheless, anti-drug officials continue to push the campaign.

De Vallance said one statistic that emphasizes the severity of marijuana
use -- and a reason to continue pushing the campaign -- is the national
increase in emergency room visits citing marijuana as the primary drug
involved in the injury. The number of visits induced or related to the use
of marijuana has increased, she said.

De Vallance referred to information provided by the Drug Abuse Warning
Network, a national survey published by the federal Substance Abused and
Mental Health Services Administration in Rockville.

According to the data, marijuana mentions in emergency room visits in the
United States increased 15 percent, from 96,426 to 110,512, between 2000
and 2001 among 12- to 34-year-olds. The numbers were not broken down to
teenagers.

But Mirken said the statistic is skewed, and counting the number of
marijuana mentions does not conclude that a patient went to the hospital
for behavior caused by marijuana.

"That's a perfect example of misuse of statistics," Mirken said. "Those
statistics mean nothing."

Mirken said the statistic does not account for incidents when marijuana was
used, but did not lead to the emergency room visit. For example, he said a
person could be smoking in a parked car and get hit by another car, and his
accident would be assumed to be related to marijuana.

While his group does not support marijuana use among youths, the campaign's
good intentions may have a backlash, he said.

"The way they present their numbers is fundamentally dishonest," Mirken
said. " Marijuana doesn't cause kids to use other drugs, but lying to them
does."

Is marijuana harmless?

One of the factors that makes marijuana so dangerous is the myths
surrounding it, de Vallance said.

"There are far too many myths about this drug pervading in our society,"
she said. "What the campaign is trying to do is educate them on the dangers
of marijuana."

Possibly the biggest myth surround marijuana is how harmless it is.

According to Rumbaugh, an MCPS substance abuse prevention specialist, the
parents of today's children were told when they were growing up that
marijuana was harmless, and that attitude has persisted.

"Right now, the parents of our kids in Montgomery County are the product of
a generation of the [largest] drug-using culture in the world," Rumbaugh
said. "They don't believe it, how it harms."

Rumbaugh said some parents are not aware of the different uses of
marijuana, which is more hazardous today than 10 years ago. She said
smoking dippers -- marijuana soaked in PCP and formaldehyde and then dried
- -- is common.

"Parents used to say, 'It's only beer. It's OK to drink as long as they
don't drive,'" Rumbaugh said. "Marijuana use is much more difficult, but
they are not realizing the risks."

According the National Institute on Drug Abuse, marijuana contains three to
five times more tar and carcinogens than a cigarette. In addition, the
level of THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), the chemical in marijuana that
makes one high, has increased from 1 percent to 13 percent since the 1970s.

Parents' influence on their child is the number-one deterrent when youth
decide to take drugs, which is why the campaign also stresses parent
intervention, de Vallance said.

Karen Askin of Potomac, Wootton High School's PTSA president, said she has
spoken to her 11th-grade daughter about drugs, and she understands the
difficulty some parents may have discussing the issue.

Askin said she knows of parents who have used marijuana and believe that it
is not a harmful drug because of their experiences in their youth. "I do
think that parents are a problem in the county," Askin said. "[There are]
parents who are confused as to what their views on drugs should be."

Regardless of their view, Askin said parents should remind their children
that marijuana is illegal and impairs judgment.

A Winston Churchill High School sophomore, who asked to remain anonymous,
said her parents turned their heads when they found marijuana and bongs in
their home. She said she knew her dad smoked marijuana in his youth, which
likely explained his permissive attitude. Her parents late intervened when
she told them of her problem with other drugs.

"My parents were just glad I was off hard drugs," she said.

She said she considers marijuana a mild drug compared to other drugs she
used to take, such as Percocet. She said she would drink alcohol and take
the drugs at the same time. But she said she has been sober for two months,
and her parents administer a drug test every week.

While most agree that marijuana is an inappropriate habit for youth, the
campaign's approach will continue to raise eyebrows. "When it is hysterical
and obviously exaggerated, it does more harm than good," Mirken said. "We
can do a great deal of harm if they don't trust us."

But de Vallance said any effort made to curb marijuana use among youth
should be supported in the best interest of the children and society as a
whole. "Indeed, it is simple," she said. "Marijuana is a harmful drug."