With a plethora of anti-drug advertisements on TV and in magazines daily, advertisers have begun to worry that teens could be tuning the ads out. However, according to two recent White House reports, the ads are indeed getting the desired message to their target audience.
The White House conducted two surveys to test the effectiveness of the government’s latest anti-drug ad campaigns. Of the more than 30,000 teenagers who participated, the majority said advertisements relating drug use, more specifically marijuana use, to terrorism is in fact gaining their attention
The advertisements, which focus on possible links between buying drugs, supporting drug trafficking and, as a result, supporting terrorist groups, are meant to prove that drug use may be more dangerous than teenagers previously thought.
“One of the things we tried to do was make the ads punchier and more dramatic,” said Tom Riley, Office of National Drug Control Policy spokesman.
The ads feature images of terrorists buying cars, machine guns, explosives and other dangerous materials in a parody of the popular recent MasterCard commercials.
“Our ads are contributing to a climate of disapproval of drug use that is so imperative to reducing the human, social and financial costs of this deadly disease,” White House spokesman John Walters said in a recent release.
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health reports that 49 percent of high school teenagers who had high exposure to the ads while in school were unlikely to try drugs. The survey also found that those who had seen the drug prevention ads on their own used drugs 15 percent less than those who had not seen the ads.
However, University of Wisconsin sophomore David Glotter thinks the drug laws are ridiculous.
“Relating marijuana to terrorism is absurd. The U.S. drug laws are preposterous, and there are more important issues that they should be spending their time and money on.”
Ivan Preston, a Professor Emertus in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at UW, recognizes some of the outrage that may stem from the airing of these types of ads and said that anti-drug ads are treated much differently than regular advertisements.
“The anti-ads are not considered to involve commercial speech like regular ads,” Preston said. “That means that essentially they are not regulated by law, although they are subject to constraints from the public that may arise from social outrage.”
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more teenagers in treatment have a diagnosis of marijuana dependence than all other illicit drugs combined. In a 2002 survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 8.3 percent of the population, age 12 or over, used illicit drugs.
Preston believes comparing terrorism to drug use changes the subject.
“The drug issue may go on a lot longer than the terrorism issue and so drug issue should stay related to the drug issue,” he said.
The Anti-Drug, a National Youth anti-drug media campaign, said money spent buying drugs could finance “unspeakable crimes” around the world.
President George W. Bush was even quoted on the national Anti-Drug website as saying, “It’s so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists, that terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder.”
Though the ads may work for a percentage of the nation’s youth, there are still many who feel that the drug-terrorist link is taking it to far.
“Anti-drug ads, when portraying the actual truth, are effective,” UW sophomore Melissa Frey said. “But when the ads make up extreme cases about the negative effects of substance abuse, they seem completely unbelievable.”
