TEEN ANTI-DRUG CAMPAIGN TAKES NEW FORM

DETROIT -- In the 1980s, a frying egg was used as a scary metaphor
for a brain sizzling on drugs.

Two decades later, the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy's National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign has launched an
Above the Influence campaign -- a play on the saying "under the
influence" -- to remind teens to just say no to drugs but in a unique way.

Unlike the previous ads that have tried to shock teens into action,
the new ads use humor, exaggeration and shame to play on teens'
desires to maintain their identities and reject negative influences.
The ads will run through April.

"This campaign recognizes teens are very concerned with who they are,
and drugs are something they should be above," said Tom Riley,
spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "We're
trying to find ways to get them to make smart choices and to see
destructive choices like using drugs as something that would diminish
their identity."

The campaign -- which includes six TV commercials, print ads and a
Web site, www.abovetheinfluence.com, comes at a time when teens seem
to be responding to efforts to keep them off drugs.

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health released in
June, 83 percent of youths report having seen or heard an alcoholic
or drug prevention message in the past year, and those youths who
have seen those messages were much less likely than their peers to
report using illicit drugs.

The new TV spots replace some of the ads for the long-running Your
Anti Drug campaign, which was widely thought to be a difficult
concept for teens to grasp. The campaign featured ads with teens
doing such things as playing sports and other activities as their anti-drug.

Secara Burns, a Southfield-Lathrup High School student, said the Your
Anti Drug campaign was a successful way to reach her peers.

"I feel that all teens should know the effects of smoking, and every
teen should have an anti-drug," said the 15-year-old, who is involved
in such extracurricular activities as dance.

In one of the new Above the Influence TV spots, a boy, through an
interpreter, tells teens that he's an idiot for allowing his friends
to dupe him into smoking marijuana and accepting a dare that led to
his fist being stuck in his mouth. Another ad, called "Flat," shows a
girl speaking up for a friend, a teenager who looks like a deflated
human balloon who breathes heavily and wants to do nothing but sit
lifelessly on a couch after having started smoking marijuana.

The $25 million Above the Influence campaign -- the value of which is
doubled because media companies such as MTV, Fox, WB and UPN provide
one free ad for every paid one -- is a slight departure from public
service announcements of recent years.

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, New York, which partnered to
create the campaign, said the ads are the result of research and
focus groups that found today's teens respond favorably to hearing
from their peers.

As a result, the latest campaign relies less on traditional network
TV ads and focuses more on the Web and reaching teens in places such
as malls, arcades and movie theaters. The campaign also uses slang
terms such as " pot" and " weed" to describe marijuana to teens.

"Research with teens illustrates clearly that they aspire to have
their own identity and not give in to all the pressures of their
lives," said Roy Bostock, chairman of the partnership, which worked
with the Office of National Drug Control Policy and New York
City-based Foote Cone & Belding advertising firm on the campaign.

Public service announcements, particularly ones geared toward fickle
teens, typically evolve as times change.

In the '80s, using fear was a popular way to get teens to reject drug
use as reflected in the preachy tone of the Just Say No message and
TV commercials showing images of coffins and graves. The ads became
fodder for jokes among adults and children, but such tactics
continued through the late 1980s when William J. Bennett, President
George H.W. Bush's drug adviser, said: "Kids need to see more burnout cases."

But in the 1990s, after research showed that parents are more
effective communicators of the drug-free message, ads were introduced
to urge them to talk to their children about such things as
cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and sex. Indeed, the Office of National
Drug Control Policy's Your Anti Drug campaign, which began in 1999,
had two ad components -- one for teens and the other for parents.

Teen ads including a TV spot in which a woman sits at a meticulously
set dining table while it's implied her grandchild is late because of
drugs no longer will air. Continuing ads urge parents to get over
feeling like hypocrites for having smoked marijuana in their past,
then approaching the subject of drug use with their teens.

Joseph A. Califano Jr., chairman and president of the National Center
on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University and former
U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare, said campaigns to
try to stop teens from using drugs are important, but ads that reach
parents are even more critical.

"All the media campaigns in the world are nothing compared to
parental influence on teens," he said. "Nobody and nothing has as
much influence -- for good or for bad -- as parents do on teens."