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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
IMC PERSPECTIVE 22-3
VII. Special Topics and
Perspectives
22. Evaluating the Social,
Ethical, & Economic
Aspects of Advtising &
Promotion
Linking Drug Use with Terrorism
For nearly two decades advertising has been used to
address the problem of illicit drug use in the United
States. Initially the use of advertising in the war
against drugs was waged through the Partnership for
a Drug Free America, which is a private, nonprofit coalition
of professionals from the communications industry
whose collective mission is to reduce the demand
for drugs in America through media communication.
The partnership was founded in 1986 as the advertising
industry’s affirmative response to the crack
cocaine epidemic in America. Since its founding, more
than 600 commercials have been created by advertising
agencies that work on these ads on a pro bono
basis, donating the time, talent, and services of their
creative staffs. More than $2.8 billion in media time
also has been donated to the Partnership’s national
campaign, making it the largest public service ad campaign
in history.
In 1997 the U.S. government entered the media war
on drugs when the Clinton administration announced
a $2 billion federally sponsored five-year campaign to
keep kids from using drugs. As part of this effort the
U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)
was created, and the Ogilvy & Mather advertising
agency was hired to manage the account and handle
the media buying while doing some minor creative
work. While the government’s drug control office is
separate from the Partnership for a Drug Free America,
many of the initial ads used in the campaign were
pulled from the Partnership’s inventory, such as the
updated version of the famous “This is your brain on
drugs” showing actress Rachel Lee Cook using a fry-
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Companies, 2003
ing pan to smash apart a kitchen as she shouts, “This is
your brain. This is your brain on heroin.”
Over the past five years the Partnership has developed
the themes for the drug office ads and selected
the ad agencies to produce the ads. The ONDCP has
provided nearly $200 million a year in funding for the
Partnership’s antidrug efforts, primarily to help pay
for advertising time and space. However, while the two
organizations are supposed to be working together in
the battle to combat drug use, they have gone in different
directions recently in their approaches to how
advertising can best be used to address the problem.
The perspective taken by the Partnership in most of
its ads has been to discourage drug use by helping
people, particularly children and teenagers, understand
the dangers of using them. Many of the ads
developed by the Partnership over the past 16 years
have focused on resistance techniques that young
people can use when confronted with the choice of
using drugs, positive alternatives to drug use, and the
importance of parental involvement as a way of deterring
drug use. However, under its new director, John P.
Walters, the ONDCP is taking a different perspective
by arguing that the way to deal with the drug problem
is to eliminate the flow of drugs at their source. To
accomplish this goal, the ONDCP commissioned
Ogilvy & Mather to develop an advertising campaign
outside the normal channels of the Partnership for a
Drug Free America, one linking drug use with the support
of terrorism.
The first ads in the campaign ran during the 2002
Super Bowl and took advantage of the public’s outrage
over the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
that occurred on September 11, 2001. The commercials
featured footage of assault weapons, duct tape, and
explosives and implied that the weapons used by terrorists
were funded by drug sales in the United States.
Some groups were critical of the ads and the government’s
effort to draw a connection between drug
money and terrorism, arguing that it was unfair to
blame nonviolent drug users for the actions of terrorists.
However, the director of the campaign for the
ONDCP described the reaction to the first set of ads as
phenomenal, noting that it generated debate on the
drug issue.
Eight months after the first ads ran, ONDCP followed
with another set of ads that are designed to
refute the notion that drug use is a victimless crime
by linking drug use to crime and terrorism. The drug
office noted that viewers of the initial ads had a
difficult time believing that the drug-terrorism link
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