YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS: ANY QUESTIONS? YES

This Space For Rent

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) thinks you are stupid. I
realized this on Sunday as I was driving to Syracuse and listening to the
Giants-Vikings game on the radio. Now, I normally hate the radio (ever
since they took "Don McNeill's Breakfast Club" off the air, the entire
medium has been going to hell), but I had (ill-advisedly) put money on the
Vikings and I felt compelled to keep tabs on my investment.

Among the many inane advertisements I heard during the broadcast ("Win a
party with HOT PENTHOUSE PETS," screamed one ad, leading me to conclude
that America's radio ad copywriters must all have second jobs writing
subject headers for porno spam emails), one from the PDFA stood out in
particular.

The commercial in question featured a teenage girl talking "candidly" to
her parents about drugs. "I'm at that age," she said (I am paraphrasing
here), "when you'll ask me 'Where are you going?' and I'll say 'Leave me
alone!' But I don't really mean it. I know that if you don't ask me the
hard questions, I'm more likely to smoke pot. So next time I say 'Leave me
alone,' don't listen to me. Because what I really mean is 'Thanks.'"

This struck me as particularly disingenuous, even by the advertising
industry's standards. For the spot to work, the listener has to accept the
premise that it really does present the innermost thoughts of a teenage
girl. Yet this illusion is ruined by the realization that the girl in the
ad is a paid actress, speaking lines written by an advertising agency.
Although the script purports to originate from America's youth, in
actuality it's written by adults and for adults. The whole premise is
patently false.

Once this is realized, the entire content of the commercial is called into
question. It's not as if the PDFA went from house to house polling
teenagers on what they really thought about drugs, parents and suburban
angst, analyzed the data, and then came up with a commercial based on the
evidence they gathered. Rather, they came into the process with a basic
framework of the message they wanted to send -- "Parents, keep tabs on your
kids to stop them from using drugs" -- and onto this framework they pasted
the image of a teenage girl, speaking her mind. When analyzed in this
context, one realizes that, instead of the personalized heart-to-heart
conversation the ad attempts to portray, the entire thing reeks of groupthink.

The ad makes a blanket assumption that every teenager says one thing and
means another, and in an ironic parallel, the commercial in question
features a similar dichotomy of text and subtext. The text -- the
commercial itself, unexamined and unanalyzed -- says "This is what
teenagers are really thinking." The subtext -- the commercial as viewed in
a compositional and structural light -- says "While we might not actually
know what all kids think about drugs, our intentions are good and our goals
are noble, so the tactics we use to get our message across don't matter."

But tactics do matter, that's the thing. I know lots of people who made it
a point to do more drugs after viewing the television spot equating drug
use to terrorism -- in response to both the ad's heavy-handed scare tactics
and its blatant disregard for logic and empirical evidence. By eschewing
facts in favor of clumsy, statistically suspect imagery, the PDFA and the
Office of National Drug Control Policy insult my intelligence.

If you're trying to change my opinion, as the PDFA is, you will not succeed
if your only persuasive weapon is the same sweeping statements and simple
imagery used to sell pickup trucks and Coors Light.

The PDFA is laboring under a gross misunderstanding of what it takes to
persuade the younger generation. I picture the PDFA as a motley assortment
of soccer moms, born-agains and guidance counselors, meeting weekly in
their secret lair somewhere in America's heartland, eating butter-flavored
popcorn, watching reruns of 7th Heaven, and trying to "get inside the
heads" of America's youth. It is a tall order. We are more media-savvy than
any other generation in history.

We know all of the tactics -- we've seen them all before. We're not going
to be persuaded by a fried egg and an ominous voiceover. Want to convince
us? Give us empirical evidence that hasn't been taken out of context. Want
to win us over to your side? Give us facts.

But the PDFA can't give us facts, because the facts don't bear out their
argument that one toke will turn you into a slavering junkie. So instead
they turn to scare tactics and mindgames. If you smoke that joint, then the
terrorists win. Keep on questioning me, Daddy. This is your brain on drugs.
Don't experiment. Don't analyze. Don't think.

Anti-drug crusaders don't mind doing things this way, because they're
fueled by a sense of moral outrage more than anything else -- and moralists
have always cravenly turned to grotesque imagery and factual manipulations
when truth and evidence eludes them. Theirs is a crusade beyond the scope
of policy or logic. That's why they feel they can be so irresponsible with
truth and method -- because the ends justify the means.

But if the means they use are so transparently contrived and manipulative,
how can they ever expect any rational person to accept their ends?

The PDFA thinks I am stupid. On this point -- as on just about every other
point they make -- the PDFA is wrong. And until they realize this and
change their strategy, the PDFA will continue to fight a losing battle.