Buying Initiatives II 

Daniel Forbes writes on social policy and has testified before both the U.S. Senate and the House about his work.

Clearly, with massive amounts already spent to no discernible effect on youth drug use, some change is in order. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has issued two reports declaring that the media campaign doesn't keep kids from drugs; that in fact, it even promotes drug use by girls and younger teens. Similarly, the Office of Management and Budget found "no evidence" that the ads "have a direct effect on youth drug-related behavior."

Lloyd D. Johnston, a University of Michigan psychologist who has run national teen drug-use surveys for the feds every year since 1975, testified in June 2002 before both the House and Senate on the campaign's remarkable lack of efficacy.

"My own hypothesis for some time has been that placing the name Office of Drug Control Policy as a tag line at the end of each ad causes many young people to dismiss the message content immediately upon viewing," Johnston told lawmakers then. "After all, the credibility of the message is judged in large part by the identity of the message-giver, and an 'office' involved in 'control' and 'policy' is not likely to be a source from whom adolescents would welcome a communication."

When seeking to influence elections, of course the White House would prefer not to identify itself. But even just pursuing the campaign's ostensible purpose -- curtailing youth drug use -- the lack of any identifying tag in the ads works to ONDCP's advantage. And the new bill being marked up this week would void a Federal Communications Commission ruling from November 2002 that ONDCP must identify its ads.

Messages that do not identify their sources may work better, but the FCC has been hesitant in the past to grant advertisers carte blanche in this area. In a 1977 case involving the Postal Service, the FCC rejected a waiver request regarding notice. The agency acknowledged that an ad "may be more effective from an advertiser's point of view... if the required sponsorship identification is not made." But neither reduced effectiveness nor any increased cost bear on the disclosure requirement, the FCC ruled, adding, "In fact, almost any advertiser could seek exemption from the statutory sponsorship identification requirements on similar grounds." And that's with the post office -- not the politically charged arena of criminal justice policy.

Referring to the proposed lack of an identifying tagline, Gary Blitz, national coordinator of the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund, said, "I think this opens the door to the type of government-embedded messages in the media just as in the Soviet Union."

Whether the government's social marketing is identified or not, the media campaign was designed to influence the vote on state ballot initiatives. Court records indicate the campaign was engendered at a meeting convened by Clinton Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey nine days after medical marijuana initiatives passed in Arizona and California in 1996. McCaffrey, other White House officials, representatives of the Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI and the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services and Treasury discussed the need for taxpayer-funded advertising to thwart potential medical marijuana initiatives in the other 48 states and perhaps even to roll back the two that had passed. One private-sector participant was quoted in the meeting's minutes as saying, "We'll work with Arizona and California to undo it and stop the spread of legalization to [the] other 48 states." (See "Fighting 'Cheech & Chong' Medicine", published in July 2000 on Salon.com.)

As the media campaign unfolded (also disclosed on Salon), ONDCP provided a total of $22 million in financial incentives to the TV networks for government-vetted anti-drug scripts. ONDCP consultants promulgated specific script changes at the government's behest. And the same financial-credit-for-content paradigm was in place at some of the nation's most prominent nonfiction magazines as well.

The Bush administration eventually discontinued that portion of the campaign. But it didn't hesitate to use the ads for partisan political ends during the past electoral season. As I disclosed in September in the newsletter DrugWar.com, ONDCP Deputy Director Mary Ann Solberg discussed using that season's upcoming ads at an anti-ballot initiative strategy session last August at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Detroit. Some 50 judges, sheriffs, prosecutors, state police and private drug warriors attended to plot the defeat of treatment-not-prison reform measures headed for the Michigan and Ohio ballots.

According to the invitation, the meeting would "provide insight on successful strategies to combat legalization," and also "provide presentations on how the DEA can assist state leaders in this battle." Participants would discuss how to "share their ideas and strategies and possibly combine resources in combating" treatment rather than incarceration measures. (Michigan's initiative was subsequently disqualified on technical grounds, and Ohio's defeated at the polls.)

One participant, Judge Brian W. MacKenzie, District Judge in Michigan's 52nd District, said that ONDCP's Solberg "talked of the federal government's new initiative with regard to marijuana." He said she described it as a new nationwide ad campaign designed to educate the public about pot's dangers. The upcoming ad campaign was pretty much Solberg's entire focus, MacKenzie said.

The ads Solberg promised delivered the goods. ONDCP's pre-election effort linked drugs to acts of terror -- or at least violence -- in a country whose nerves were already jangling. It demonized marijuana, depicting pot's purchase and use as helping to slaughter a family of innocents, cripple an innocent bystander, bomb a restaurant, directly run over a kid on a bicycle or mistakenly shoot a friend.

The drugs-equal-terror equation was endlessly pounded home. One ad had a young stoner mindlessly intoning, "I kill mothers, I kill fathers," etc., down through slaughtered children and grandparents on to -- in a direct reference to the World Trade Center -- his killing of policemen and firemen.

A pre-election, 2002 ONDCP "Talking Points" memo stated that: "TV, print, radio, and interactive advertising deliver[ing] powerful messages to dispel the myths [will involve] spending nearly $48 million in advertising just through December '02...." Since Congress requires that media outlets sell ONDCP ads 50-cents-on-the-dollar, that $48 million is matched dollar-for-dollar by the media. So, a whopping $96 million in anti-drug advertising flooded the country during and just after the election season.

This means that although the current bill calls for a 'mere' $1.02 billion over the next five years, minus overhead, that actually translates to some $2 billion in media time and space.

And fully half of the ONDCP media buy has always been directed at "adult influencers" -- otherwise known as voters. This despite the fact that, as NIDA concluded: "[T]he evidence does not as yet support an effect of parent exposure on youth behavior." That is, "There was no... evidence for any group that parent exposure was associated with lower marijuana consumption among youth."

The administration is frustrated by how ineffective the war on drugs has proven, in spite of massive media campaigns. And maybe some change is in order, but it shouldn't involve allowing the government to lay an anonymous finger on the scale when voters are deciding what's in their best interests. That measure has no historical precedent, and there's no reason to start now.