Can You Just Say No?

It’s a fresh new feeling, the coolest high.

So pick up some heroin--and shoot for the sky!

Everybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it.

Everybody’s doin’ it. . . .

Glamorous parties, a night on the town.

With beautiful people, it’s always around!

Everybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it. . . .

Her-o-in! For the rest of your life!

--Television jingle accompanying black-and-white footage of a grimy boy twitching and retching into a filthy toilet

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On Madison Avenue, it is still revered as one of the hottest marketing ideas of all time.

Take the decision to buy and use heroin (or pot, or coke or any illegal drug) and treat it like any other purchasing choice.

Liken potential addicts to a group of consumers whose buying habits can be manipulated by celebrity endorsements, catchy slogans and powerful images.

Then use those tricks not to sell the product, but to un-sell it.

If the approach works, drugs will finally lose their cool.

It’s a very big “if.” But for more than a decade, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America’s pro bono campaign to get and keep American young people off drugs has been betting as much as $1 million worth of advertising every day that it does work.

Since 1985, more than 250 big-name ad agencies from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and other cities have been enlisted to volunteer their time and talent to create new and better ways of helping people say no to drugs.

Thanks to the Partnership’s high-powered connections and unabashed arm-twisting, TV networks, newspapers, magazines and other media outlets have donated more than $2 billion in free space and time to ensure that the messages are seen.

The newest campaign is against heroin. This time its creators are finding their ads against the drug a hard sell.

“These ads are not pretty. They are not nice. They are not polite,” says Doria Steedman, the Partnership’s director of creative development. She concedes that the ads were designed to disturb and upset.

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Heroin lets you look at things differently. “I saw a dog and thought: If I was a dog, I wouldn’t have a heroin habit. I wish I was a dog.”

--Partnership TV spot

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The campaign to show 18- to 25-year-olds the horrors of heroin has been pitched by the Partnership as a necessary preemptive strike. According to the U.S. government, experimentation with heroin is increasing among teens and young adults. “We have to make the case that heroin is a fundamental threat,” says retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He has endorsed the Partnership’s work and been a spokesman at Partnership news conferences.

The Partnership has dozens of new ads. The problem is getting them seen. Although newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have given full pages to the campaign as often as once a week, few other papers have been so generous. And while Capital Cities/ABC Inc. television and many big city stations have given the Partnership prime-time advertising spots, some of the most dramatic anti-heroin messages seem to be getting lost in busy daily schedules or not being aired at all.

And, although contracts to spread the Partnership’s message are still much sought after among creative types, in-kind gifts of advertising talent, ad preparation, and print space and air times are down at least $100 million since 1991 when the nonprofit group’s annual support peaked at $365 million.

“Combine that with a drop in news coverage of the dangers of drug use, and the impact of anti-drug messages on the nation is lower than it has been since we started,” says Partnership President Dick Bonnette.

Over the past several years, the Partnership has been fighting a nonchalance about the drug problem--”as if the war on drugs was over, when in fact, it is not even near the end,” Bonnette says.

So it came as no surprise here last week when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that two new surveys reveal teenage drug use has risen sharply since 1992, and with it, young people’s visits to hospitals for drug-related emergencies.

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This is your brain . . . this is drugs . . . this is your brain on drugs.

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It is one of the most unforgettable images in modern American advertising. Among the Partnership’s first and most famous anti-drug spots, it was shown repeatedly on television and in print.

An unbroken egg. A hot pan. The egg frying in the pan. That ad became the calling card of the organization that began with a $300,000 grant from the Associated Advertising Agencies of America and has done more to mobilize volunteer talent against a single social problem than perhaps any other.

Starting with an idea hatched by Los Angeles ad guru Phillip Joanou in 1985, the Partnership has created, aired, printed, skywritten and song-and-danced some $2 billion worth of anti-drug public service messages. For most of its history, the Partnership has been sustained by substantial grants from the Princeton, N.J.-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funds many health projects, especially those aimed at fighting substance abuse.

Early Partnership ads have featured such images as a girl with the barrel of a revolver pushed up one nostril and a father singing a lullaby to his little daughter from his coffin.

Those spots, which were aired at no cost to the Partnership on network prime time, led the group’s charge against the social use of cocaine among the so-called cold shrimp and chardonnay crowd.

Partnership Vice Chairman Thomas Hedrick, who has been with the nonprofit group since its launch, recalls the early days when he and other veterans of New York City’s ad wars discovered to their chagrin that they knew next to nothing about illegal drugs and the youthful target audience for their ads.

“I could have told you in 60 seconds everything there was to know about laundry soap or chewing gum or who used what and why,” Hedrick says, “than I could have told you about the drug problem in our country in an entire year.” The upshot of that realization was the birth of a full-time and highly aggressive research staff.

“We needed to know our consumer--as well as our competition,” says Ginna Marston, the Partnership’s research chief. “If we are going to compete with possibly the most alluring, most effective come-on in the history of social interaction, we’d best know everything there is to know about current attitudes toward drugs and drug users.”

It didn’t take long for the Partnership to discover that the decision to experiment with drugs was based on two things: the consumer’s perception of the risk involved and the perception of social disapproval.

Or, in the words of one young Partnership research subject, “Is it cool? And will I die?”

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So when I started doing drugs, that part of me died--that part of me that, like, found joy in life and just day to day living, it went away.

--Television spot in the campaign against heroin

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Big agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, J. Walter Thompson and BBDO Worldwide joined the consortium. Top executives from the Procter & Gamble Co., the New York Times and the USA Network sat on its board of directors.

So much creative talent was vying for Partnership “assignments” that agencies would send only their best and brightest writers and producers to the contest of ideas staged monthly in a dimly lit boardroom in the Partnership’s headquarters near the top of the Chrysler Building.

“The people who compete--they compete!--to do ads for us for which they will not be paid. That is the most amazing thing about this organization,” says Steedman, the Partnership’s director of creative development. “In this cutthroat industry, where killing the competition is everything, we get the people who write Pepsi to sit down with the people who write about Coke and work together.

“We have 240 agencies around the country churning out ads and, unlike some PSAs, our creative contributors know just as the media knows these ads will get ya. They’ll pull you right in.”

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Johnny, age 21: This is my parents’ house in East Brunswick, N.J. My house where I grew up. I’ve stolen jewelry from the house. I’ve stole a CD player from my parents. I’ll go into any store. I’ll steal anything. . . . I don’t think about the food I need. . . . It’s just, you know, I need a bag. That’s it.

--Television spot in the campaign against heroin

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According to Forbes magazine, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America has enjoyed a single-brand advertising clout second only to McDonald’s, which outspends the nonprofit by more than 2 to 1.

But do the ads work? Do they change behavior?

In 1994, the Pediatrics Department at Johns Hopkins University Medical School conducted a study to measure the “deterrence effect” of anti-drug advertising on young people. That survey concluded that because American adolescents spend dozens of hours each week watching television, they view the medium as their main source of information about drugs.

“No one presumes advertising is going to stop all drug abuse in America,” says Chris Policano, spokesman for the L.A.-based Phoenix House, a substance abuse service agency. “But there is no question that when radio and television are playing Partnership ads, they counter the positive drug messages in our culture.

“Using the idea that attitudes change behavior and using the best ad minds to denormalize drug use, they have sent a very strong message over the years, and their work is a very important component in the national effort to reduce drug use.”

Some observers credit the group’s evangelical fervor. As one veteran of Madison Avenue puts it, “They don’t just ‘win’ believers, they convert them with arm-twisting and the best manipulative powers in Manhattan.”

If some of the Partnership’s work is painful to watch, if some of it is too real, too sad or too scary, all the better, say the pros. “If we’re twisting arms, if we refuse to ever go second class, if we manipulate emotions, well, we’re doing it for angels,” says a Partnership executive.

Here’s Lenny on the screen, a heroin addict showing the camera a sore oozing pus on his left thigh.

Here is Ashley, an addict enlisted for an ad to deglamorize drugs. As the haggard face speaks groggily about her habit, pictures of Ashley as the fresh-faced president of her senior class and eight years later as the glamorous art director of a big advertising agency flash across the screen. Ashley is only 28, Steedman says, but she looks decades older.

“We were sitting at lunch with her one day,” Steedman recalls, “and she was talking about what drugs had done to her life and then all of a sudden, she just reached into her mouth and pulled out her [false] teeth. All the years of abuse had caused her teeth to fall out. It was, let’s just say, it was a very dramatic scene and, the moment we saw it, we knew we wanted to share it.”

Ashley’s drug of choice is heroin, which, according to a growing number of reports, is making a comeback among young white professionals. “The absolute taboo against heroin that the recreational drug users of the ‘60s--some of whom are the parents of the ‘90s--is gone,” Steedman says.

The new movie “Trainspotting,” an instant cult classic, is introducing tens of thousands of Generation Xers to a drug their parents never dreamed of using--or of warning their offspring against.

Bonnette, the Partnership’s president, says the organization’s goal is to get between the consumer and the drug. “We know that most kids don’t want to hurt themselves, and most kids want to do what’s socially acceptable. But we also know that they’re not getting the information they need to make an intelligent choice.”

“Ultimately, our research tells us that the longer we can get a kid to put off that first taste of drugs, the more likely we are to keep that kid from becoming a regular drug user,” says Hedrick, the Partnership’s vice chairman.

A former Manhattan marketing executive, Hedrick hooked up with the Partnership after his 7-year-old son was offered pot on a Greenwich, Conn., school playground. “I figured if it can happen in Greenwich, it can happen anywhere. No kid is safe. Not yours, not mine.”

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Once upon a time there was a girl named Wendy who was very beautiful and very happy and had lots of friends but then one day she did some heroin and got addicted and lost everything and then she died. The End.