SAYING NO TO PROPAGANDA

Have The Dollars Devoted To Educating, Cajoling, Pleading And Frightening Us
Away From Drugs Done The Job?

This Is Your Brain On Drugs. Just Say No. What's Your Anti-Drug? D.A.R.E. To
Keep Kids Off Drugs.

Billions have been spent on catchy slogans and flashy branding to make the
rejection of drugs as appealing as the consumption of candy. But have the
dollars devoted to educating, cajoling, pleading and frightening us away
from drugs done the job? Even those who make the ads admit a limited return
on this investment: Teen-agers see anti-drug ads 2.7 times a week, according
to the government's numbers, and yet 54 percent of all teens try drugs
before they graduate from high school.

Propaganda from the War on Drugs was supplanted by dispatches from the War
on Terrorism during the waning months of 2001. But last month the Office for
National Drug Control Policy found a way to marry the two battles in its
latest anti-drug campaign, which equates drug use with financing terrorists.
At the same time, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America debuted its own
ambitious anti-Ecstasy crusade titled "Ecstasy: Where's the Love?"

This new offensive is fueled by serious money. Congress has allocated more
than $1 billion for anti-drug advertising over the next five years; $180
million will be spent this year alone, and that's merely the quantifiable
sums (uncountable sums have been donated in free airtime and ad creation).
Although advertising demands only a tiny portion of the government's total
anti-drug budget, it's considered the cornerstone of the War on Drugs --
though there is little proof that anti-drug ads really work. In fact, there
is evidence that some anti-drug ads don't work and that others even
(unintentionally) encourage drug use, according to the newest research.

But the most vocal critics of the government's new anti-drug advertising
haven't focused on the questionable efficacy of the ads. Instead, they have
accused the Bush administration of using the War on Drugs to push a broad
and moralistic political agenda while overlooking community-based approaches
to drug abuse. Rather than offering real solutions, the critics claim, the
drug-terror campaign simply fans drug hysteria in the course of painting a
new administration's face and philosophy on the War on Drugs.

Can an ad campaign that ostensibly seeks to warn teens away from drugs serve
as political propaganda? Perhaps, if you subscribe to the idea that good
advertising can sell anything to anyone. Would this matter if the ads in
question, regardless of their political agenda, managed to make a dent in
drug abuse? Maybe not. But so far, that appears to be the problem.
Advertising can be used to create habits and sustain them, but when it comes
to drugs, it isn't necessarily an effective tool in snuffing them out.

Anti-drug propaganda, both government funded and privately sponsored, has
existed since the 1930s (think "Reefer Madness"), but it wasn't until
cocaine -- and then crack cocaine -- became a national epidemic that
federally funded anti-drug advertising as we know it was born. Nancy Reagan
launched the memorable Just Say No campaign in the 1980s at the height of a
cocaine "epidemic" that was galvanizing concerned parents and authorities;
her Just Say No advertisements, bumper stickers and T-shirts were
ubiquitous. Then in 1987 a collective of advertising professionals created
the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, hoping to do pro bono work as a
private contribution to the War on Drugs, and began peppering the airwaves
with their own anti-drug advertising. The goal was to "decrease demand for
drugs by changing societal attitudes which support, tolerate or condone drug
use." The idea was to condition kids to reject drugs, using the same
branding and market-testing principles that sell Crest toothpaste and Nike
sneakers.

According to the 1979 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 34.4 percent
of all American high school seniors reported having tried drugs, and 18.5
percent said they had done so in the last 30 days. By 1992 that figure had
dropped to 17.9 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively. Believers in the
power of anti-drug advertising invariably point to this impressive reduction
in drug use as evidence that campaigns like Just Say No and those created by
the Partnership for a Drug-Free America actually work. Then drug use began
climbing again in the 1990s, as evidenced by the statistics: By 1997, 11.4
percent of all high schoolers had done drugs in the last 30 days. The rise
coincided with the waning of the anti-drug advertising movement, a parallel
that proponents of the campaign also used as "proof" of its efficacy when
lobbying Congress for new funds. But as much as the precipitous fall and
rise of drug use in the 1980s and 1990s looked like evidence of successful
anti-drug advertising, some researchers are wary of directly connecting the
two. Robert Hornik, a professor of communication at the Annenberg School of
the University of Pennsylvania and the researcher behind a new study of the
effectiveness of anti-drug ads, says there's a "possible correlation"
between the ads and statistics of this period, but the drop in drug use
could have had as much to do with any number of factors: youth
disillusionment with drugs, as cocaine wreaked its havoc and ran its course,
plus a general nationwide furor that kept drugs in the public eye.

"There was much more noise in the environment about drugs during that
period," Hornik says. "So the number of exposures someone would have had [to
messages] about drugs was much more substantial."

When drug use again began to rise in the late 1990s, the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America and the Office for National Drug Control Policy renewed
their efforts: They began working together, and in 1998 they launched the
National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. Congress apportioned some $1
billion to pay for advertising space for the ads produced by the two groups,
and an anti-drug media blitz flooded the nation with an assortment of
anti-drug advertisements. Despite the drop in drug use, the Just Say No
message was declared irrelevant: It was the message of a former
administration and had long been eviscerated by both press and youth as the
simplistic message of an exceedingly unhip first lady. The government
shifted gears and came up with a new series of approaches.

Although the ONDCP has been releasing its own anti-drug ad campaigns since
the 1980s, the new National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign fomented a more
regimented strategy for that group. Over the last four years, the ONDCP has
released a series of "platform" advertisements: The Negative Consequences
platform, for example, includes ads that depict kids getting in trouble when
they do drugs; the Resistance Skills platform includes tips on how to say no
to peer pressure; the Parenting Skills platform instructs parents to talk to
their kids about drugs; and the Norm Education platform sends the message
that "the coolest kids don't do drugs." The main theme of the ONDCP's
campaign has been the "anti-drug" brand, which extends across several
platforms and instructs kids to find their own "anti-drug" (such as music or
sports or a pet) to keep them straight.

When Bush appointed John Walters drug czar in May of last year, drug-war
watchdog groups anticipated the beginning of another guns-and-jails era for
the ONDCP, with a greater emphasis on military and criminal punishments.
Walters, a drug "hawk" who had served under William Bennett, was well known
for his moral condemnation of drug use and his criticism of Clinton's
drug-war techniques. Although the War on Drugs dropped from the national
agenda in the days after Sept. 11, it came rushing back in January with the
ONDCP's first effort under Walters: an ad campaign that managed to conflate
moralism and nationalism with a heavy dose of guilt, and which immediately
generated a flurry of both positive and outraged media coverage.

The new ads essentially warn drug users that when they buy drugs, they are
funding terrorism. In the ads, a series of shrugging teens confess their
culpability in a variety of ugly terrorist activities: "I helped a bomber
get a fake passport. All the kids do it." The tagline: "Drug money supports
terror. If you buy drugs, you might too." The terror-drug ads seemed to
usher in a new philosophy of social guilt: Buying drugs isn't just bad for
your body and your future, but it also makes you personally liable for
politically motivated mayhem.

The drug-terrorism ads were "a definite departure" from the ONDCP's softer
"find your anti-drug" campaigns, which sought to inspire or distract kids
tempted by drugs, says ONDCP spokeswoman Jennifer de Vallance. The new ads,
she says, are representative of a new philosophy in the War on Drugs:
"Forever people have said you shouldn't use drugs because it's bad for your
body, bad for your brain, bad for your parents," says de Vallance. "These
ads take a broader perspective." Trying to convince teens that drugs are bad
for them was a losing battle, she adds. "Talking to teenagers is like
talking to Olympian gods, because they see themselves as invulnerable. But
they do appreciate the concept of social responsibility."

Bush personally described the ONDCP's strategy as ushering in a new "period
of personal responsibility," moving away from "if it feels good, do it" to
an age of "morals." Explained the ONDCP in a news release: "Americans must
set norms that reaffirm the values of responsibility and good citizenship
while dismissing the notion that drug use is consistent with individual
freedom."

But critics have claimed that the ads are merely heavy-handed propaganda for
the Bush administration's conservative agenda: By associating the War on
Drugs with the popular War on Terrorism, they say, the administration hopes
to curry support for its more militaristic approach to battling drug use.
"There's a new troika driving U.S. drug policy: Attorney General John
Ashcroft, Asa Hutchinson [head of the Drug Enforcement Administration] and
Walters," says Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a
nonprofit organization that advocates drug-war reform and harm-reduction
approaches to drug abuse. "All three of them are interested in drug policy
primarily in terms of advancing a more reactionary political agenda in the
U.S. They are making an effort to resuscitate the Bennett-politicized drug
war of a decade ago."

(In the weeks following the release of the ads, Walters also announced a new
plan to reduce national drug use by 25 percent, relying heavily on
interdiction, criminal justice and military approaches, with additional
dollars going to specialized treatment programs. Meanwhile, the DEA staged
two high-profile drug busts, including one on the controversial legalized
cannabis clubs of San Francisco.)

Even those in the advertising industry concur that the drug-terror
advertisements appear to have as much to do with maintaining support for the
government's efforts as they do with actually reducing drug use. If the
administration associates policy of any kind with the popular War on
Terrorism, say veterans of the advertising industry, it is likely to
maintain high approval ratings. As Mark DiMassimo, CEO of DiMassimo
Advertising (and the creator of a series of Ecstasy ads for the Partnership
for a Drug-Free America), puts it: "This is wartime propaganda. It's sort of
like going back to World II and World War I when they related what you eat
and don't eat -- whether you threw out leftover rice -- to the war effort."

But even as the debate rages about the nuance and approach in this campaign,
new research shows that, regardless of their content or gimmick, anti-drug
advertisements aren't necessarily making an impression on the audience they
are meant to sway anyway. The political propaganda behind the terror-drug
ads would be forgivable, theoretically, if the ads were actually convincing
vast numbers of American youth to steer clear of drugs. But judging by the
most recent research on anti-drug advertising efficacy, the ONDCP may need
to return to the drawing board.

It is possible, of course, that guilt about terrorism as a means of
enforcing "social responsibility" will in fact cause drug usage to plummet
dramatically. Maybe teens really will steel themselves with thoughts of
Osama bin Laden the next time someone offers them a joint and just say no.
(Never mind the fact that the joint was more likely to come from Humboldt
County than Afghanistan or Iraq.) But the experts aren't counting on it,
partly because recent reports show that, in general, there's no concrete
link between anti-drug propaganda and teen drug-use rates.

According to deVallance, the new terror-drug ads have been hugely
successful, both because of the buzz they've created (some 175 articles have
been written about the campaign already) and because of the impact they
supposedly have had on youth. "These ads, in focus group testing, had among
the highest results of reducing intention to use that we've seen in the
history of the campaign," says de Vallance, who reports that more than 70
percent of the focus group teens said the ads would deter them from trying
drugs.

While encouraging, the focus group reports do not ensure that the
drug-terror ads will work. In fact, it is quite possible that in these days
of fulsome anti-terror rhetoric, the focus group teens felt pressured to
report that they wouldn't support terrorism by doing drugs.

When the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign launched in 1998, a massive
research effort launched with it: With more than $1 billion apportioned for
anti-drug advertising, the stakes were high enough to initiate a process to
establish whether the money was well spent. The effort was spearheaded by
Westat, an independent research group in Maryland, with the University of
Penn-sylvania's Annenberg School conducting much of the actual research.
Every six months researchers visit some 8,000 kids and their parents in
their homes to interview them about their personal drug use and the ads
they've seen. (They are promised anonymity.) Three reports have been issued
since the research began in September 1999; three more are still to come. In
October 2001 the researchers published their latest report assessing the
cumulative effectiveness of all the new ads that had been issued by the
National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign since its launch. The good news was
that drug ads targeting parents often do encourage parents to talk to their
kids about drugs. The bad news was that, thus far, the media campaign hadn't
had a measurable impact on the kids at all.

The average kid is currently seeing an anti-drug ad 2.7 times a week,
according to Hornik, Annenberg School professor and the scientific director
of the report. "We're seeing lots of reports of exposure," says Hornik. But
"we haven't seen any real change over time, and no real association between
exposure and outcomes." This means that the kids see the ads, but it doesn't
seem to have an immediate impact on their drug-use behavior.

Hornik warns that the October data represent only 18 months' worth of
research and that there will be three more reports. "It could be that it
will take more time for the kids to be affected," he says. Still, Hornik's
report isn't the only one with bad news for anti-drug advertisers: In the
American Journal of Public Health, an unrelated group of University of
Pennsylvania researchers also discovered that many of the approaches used by
anti-drug ads are not only ineffective, but often even encourage kids to do
drugs.

"Although there is some evidence that mass media campaigns can be
successful, most studies evaluating mass media campaigns have found little
or no effect," the report posits. The researchers selected 30 anti-drug
advertisements created by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America in the
last four years and showed them to 3,608 students in grades five through 12.
Afterward they interviewed the students about their responses to the ads.
The researchers broke down the ads into categories: ads that focused on the
negative consequences of drug use (i.e., "This is your brain on drugs"); ads
that focused on self-esteem issues (i.e., "the anti-drug"); ads that
stressed "just say no," as well as celebrity testimonials; and a category of
ads about the dangers of heroin or methamphetamines. They then used the
students' responses to measure the overall efficacy of each approach.

The results were decidedly mixed. Researchers discovered that 16 ads seemed
to be effective in discouraging drug use, but another eight ads had no
measurable effect whatsoever, and six ads actually spurred the viewer to
either want to go try the drugs or feel less confident about how to reject
them. Unfortunately, the ads that had the greatest impact on the viewers
were the ones that scared kids away from heroin and methamphetamines --
drugs that most teens are not likely to try anyway. The least effective ads
were the ones that addressed marijuana and "drugs in general" -- ironically,
the drugs that most teens are doing in the first place.

As the report concluded, "it may be much more difficult to change young
people's beliefs, attitudes and intentions regarding use of marijuana than
use of 'harder drugs'... The PSAs appear to have the biggest impact on those
who seem to need them the least; or, those who most need to be influenced by
these PSAs (i.e., those who do not view these risky behaviors as harmful or
dangerous) are least likely to view the PSAs as effective." In other words,
the kids who are already prone to try drugs aren't going to be discouraged
by what they see in the ads, and the kids who wouldn't try them anyway are
going to be most affected.

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America acknowledges the results of the
study but has no plans to change its approach. In general, says Steve
Dnistrian, the executive vice president of the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America, it's difficult to find concrete evidence that advertising does or
doesn't work -- to draw a direct line of cause (advertisement) with effect
(purchase, or in the case of drugs, lack thereof).

"There is no perfect way to measure advertising effectiveness," he says.
"These [research results] are numbers we would take on any day of the week;
in our mind, this is a very, very strong case to be made for the
effectiveness of these ads. It also points to the issue that we've known for
a long time: No single ad will do the trick, which is why you need multiple
ads and multiple strategies."

Dnistrian does have a point: Critical as many people are of many anti-drug
campaigns, it's difficult to advocate that they be completely removed from
the airwaves. Even if the ads aren't individually effective, they keep the
issue of drugs in the public dialogue. And during those serendipitous times
when anti-drug ads dovetail with national alarm over a topic -- the
influence of "Big Tobacco" or the sudden widespread use of crack -- it is
likely that they influence a broad, if brief, disgust with all drugs. But
even if anti-drug campaigns succeed in keeping drugs in the public
consciousness, there is a nagging issue, exposed in research, that some ads
are so bad they alienate their intended audience. Advertising executive
DiMassimo says the ONDCP's ads are particularly egregious, at least from an
advertising executive's point of view: "The ONDCP generates long lists of
approved messaging. Much of it comes out in the clunky language of social
scientists, and it is a source of amusement and consternation among the
creative people and communication professionals who make up the
Partnership."

The various advertising agencies that contribute to the Partnership's
campaign tend to use traditional tools in creating their ads. DiMassimo
describes this as "going to hang out with teens, learn about them and then
coming back with details in their language, like a cultural anthropologist."
This type of saturation research works much of the time, he says, admitting
that some ad industry veterans who have used this approach to make
anti-drugs ads have often missed the mark as well.

Based on his own experience advertising to kids, DiMassimo believes that ads
that try to be "cool" are the ones that will be received most skeptically --
for example, the clunky series of ads that educated teenagers on how to say
no to the drugged-out "cool" kids who hang out at "hip" parties. The ads
appeared to have been made by out-of-touch authorities who have no idea how
kids dress, talk or dance.

The biggest mistake, says DiMassimo, is when the ads "overstate the danger"
of drugs. "Kids believe anti-drug people are stiff, uptight, over-nervous
parental-type figures, and when you overdo it you play in to that side of
the brand," he says. Kids know perfectly well that drugs are fun, he says,
and there is little point in trying to tell them otherwise, a la Reefer
Madness. He describes the best kind of ad as a cost- benefit analysis: "The
Partnership's work on marijuana is understated -- we say that no one says
pot will kill you but that there are better things to be than a burnout." He
uses the ONDCP's terrorism ads as an example of the worst kind of
authoritarian browbeating of teens and believes most kids will know the ads
are overstated.

Still, DiMassimo's own campaign -- the Partnership's ambitious new
anti-Ecstasy initiative -- could be accused of overstatement. Twenty-seven
people out of an estimated 3.4 million who used Ecstasy between 1994 and
1999 died under the influence of the drug; yet the new campaign chooses to
focus on the death of one young woman as a warning against using the drug.
You could say the ads are merely focusing on the worst-case scenario, but
kids who are aware of just how rare Ecstasy deaths are might simply reject
the ads wholesale as authoritarian exaggeration. Other anti-Ecstasy ads are
equally dramatic, depicting teens partying it up on E while their friend
lies passed out and alone in the bathroom, under the tagline "Ecstasy:
Where's the Love?"

Critics of anti-drug advertising who follow this research wonder whether ads
that try to discourage kids from doing drugs aren't mostly futile. They
often insist the money would be better spent addressing kids who do drugs
and need help dealing with their addiction. "Everything the ONDCP and
Partnership does is focused on Just Say No, mostly scare tactics, and
occasionally a positive message about why you shouldn't choose drugs," says
Nadelmann. "We think you should do messages directed at young people who are
already experimenting or doing drugs, aimed at keeping them out of trouble."
He notes, "Surveys show that campaigns directed at getting people to not do
things are the least effective."

Drug-war reformers like Nadelmann and David Borden, executive director of
the liberal Drug Reform Coordination Network, tend to support peer-education
programs and harm-reduction principles over blanket advertising (and
similarly they prefer legalization or treatment to expensive interdiction).
"You have to meet people where they are. Every young person is in a
different place, so the programs that will work the best are the ones that
are run by or with their peers," says Borden. "You can't do that by running
ads during the Super Bowl."

It will take months, even years, to know whether the new anti-drug campaign
has an impact on drug use, although Walters has promised that these efforts
and others will reduce drug use by 25 percent by 2007. It is a bold
commitment given that the ingredients of effective anti-drug advertising
remain something of a mystery, and since youthful tastes are as flighty as
the videos on MTV, they probably will remain so for quite some time. But
there is also little evidence to suggest that Walters would get better
results if he moved his 180 million ad dollars to peer-education programs
and harm-reduction groups. The terror-drug ads are perhaps best viewed as a
public relations machine for the Bush administration, summing up in a few
words (and a lot of taxpayer money) the government's moral philosophies, the
way Just Say No summed up the Reagan era.

Government drug propaganda is just that: propaganda veiled as a behavior
modification tool. It seems that no number of simplistic, catchy anti-drug
slogans can fully shape America's convoluted and varied attitude toward
drugs. Even certain Bush family members have been known to stray, and surely
Bush Senior told them all about Just Say No. Perhaps some Americans will
always have an appetite for drugs, and no remedy -- advertising,
interdiction, education or criminal punishment -- will ever eradicate it.