Annenberg: Nat'l anti-drug campaign backfired

What's your anti-drug?

For many targets of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign - a five-year, $1 billion effort by the federal government to promote drug-resistance skills, alternatives and negative consequences - it doesn't seem to matter.

A recent evaluation led by the Annenberg School for Communication found little correlation between exposure to anti-drug advertisements and anti-drug beliefs. And for some segments of the population, the ads may have even increased the likelihood of drug use.

Communication professor Robert Hornik, the study's lead author, said 94 percent of youths reported exposure to one or more messages per month.

But he found that the ads did not produce anti-marijuana effects. Non-drug users exposed to more of the campaign's messages were no more likely to express anti-drug beliefs than those who had less exposure.

Even more significantly, he added, the campaign may have achieved the opposite of what it intended to do: Youth ages 12.5 to 18 who saw the ads were in fact more likely to intend to use drugs at later dates.

Hornik said the campaign's weakness was the inference invited by its overall message about drug-use - that everybody is doing it.

"Even though each message said 'don't use drugs,' the set of messages communicated that everyone is using drugs," he said. "Kids exposed to the campaign came to the conclusion that many of their peers were using drugs, so they were more likely to initiate use themselves."

Congress mandated the evaluation in order to assess the effectiveness of the campaign. Major findings will be published in December's American Journal of Public Health.

Hornik said that although the Government Accountability Office - the investigative arm of Congress - thinks the findings are accurate, the Office of National Drug Control Policy "sharply challenged" the results and continued its anti-drug campaign, albeit with some modifications. The ONDCP did not return request for comment.

A further consequence of the evaluation is that it undermines previous assumptions about anti-drug campaigns, Hornik said.

"People thought that if worse comes to worse, [campaigns] just won't have any effects," he said. "Now, we have at least some evidence that the campaign encouraged rather than discouraged drug use. So you have to be careful."

Penn State communications professor Michael Hecht, who directs the Drug Resistance Strategies Project, said the results of this study shouldn't be used to generalize the effectiveness of anti-drug campaigns or write off their potential.

While it's clear that this particular campaign was ineffective, Hecht said, other media campaigns have addressed health concerns more successfully, such as the anti-smoking Truth campaign.

"Telling kids that drugs are immoral and dangerous is hard in 30 seconds," Hecht said. "People are expecting too much from a short message on single channel."

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