Drug Wars' Super Sunday

[boomerchick]

Drug Wars' Super Sunday

By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet
January 28, 2004

This year's fictitious Bud Bowl has a different match-up: Instead of a tussle between animated helmet-wearing Budweiser bottles and its arch-rival Bud Light, the company will be taking on a real world rival – a White House that claims drinking leads to drug use.


Over the past twenty years, since what AdWeek.com calls the "electrifying introduction of Apple's Macintosh which transformed the final showdown of the football season into the greatest advertising event of the year," the National Football League's Super Bowl has become Super Sunday for advertising agencies and multinational corporations. Nearly as remarkable as the game itself are the advertisements which keep some viewers from hitting their remotes, especially during one-sided games like last year's Tampa Bay Buccaneers' rout of the Oakland Raiders.


Major advertisers understand that edgy, innovative and occasionally wicked ads create buzz, and buzz makes the $2.3 million they're paying for a 30-second spot worthwhile. Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based brewer of Budweiser Beer, "the game's exclusive national beer sponsor for more than a decade" has purchased ten 30-second spots, AdWeek.com reported. Sony will have nine spots aired during the multi-hour pre-game show, and America Online, FedEx, and Frito-Lay are also on board. Pizza Hut will use pop-star Jessica Simpson and the Muppets to kick off a $50 million campaign aimed at encouraging families to "gather 'round the good stuff." Also touting "the good stuff" are Eli Lilly and Icos Corp., GlaxoSmithKline and Bayer, and Pfizer, all makers of erectile-dysfunction drugs.


Leaving no drug-war advertising opportunity behind, John Walters' White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) will be encouraging people to stay away from the "good stuff" during the premiere of its latest advertising campaign which launches on Super Bowl Sunday; a campaign that for the first time "subtly" makes the connection between drinking and drug use.


Ironically, the unveiling of the most recent ONDCP's campaign against marijuana comes on the heels of a recently released study concluding that the White House's anti-drug campaigns have had little impact on American teenagers, its primary target, and news that two employees of the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges they were defrauding the government in connection with their work for the White House drug office.


The report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) – part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – was conducted jointly by the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Westat, a 30-year-old research firm in Rockville, Md. It covered anti-drug advertising campaigns conducted between September 1999 and June 2003 and recognized that "there is little evidence of direct favorable [advertising] campaign effects on youth."


According to AdWeek.com, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy "links drug use with drinking ... for the first time in the campaign's five-year history." While the ads will be previewed a few days before the Super Bowl, AdWeek.com reports that one ad targeting parents will be shown on the Super Bowl telecast and the other, aimed at teens, will be shown during the opening episode of "Survivor: All Stars" premiering after the big game.


The advertisements, produced by New York companies Foote Cone & Belding and Ogilvy & Mather, "also promotes the concept of 'early intervention,'" a theory favored by drug czar John Walters. "The campaign enlists the power of peers and parents of teens to take early action against youth drug use and will provide information and support to help get their friends or children to stop using illicit drugs," the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said in a statement.


Here is how AdWeek.com describes the Foote Cone & Belding ad entitled "Rewind," which will air during the game:


"The story unfolds in reverse chronological order, not unlike the movie Memento. The viewer first sees a girl passed out on a couch. The scene flashes to her vomiting in a urinal. Subsequent scenes show her getting high and drinking from a red cup at a party. She then appears at school with friends, on the school bus and back at home. At that point, which is the 'beginning' of the story, the girl's mother has a chance to intervene. 'We've got to talk,' she says, holding up a bag of marijuana.


While "Rewind" doesn't "explicitly mention alcohol...[it] 'subtly' makes the association between drinking and drug use.... The ad is intended to show parents of teens who drink and smoke pot that they have an opportunity to halt the problem before their children become hard-core drug users. 'It is not an anti-drinking spot,'" a source told AdWeek.com.


The second 30-second ad, produced by Ogilvy & Mather and set to run on Survivor, is "targeted at friends of teens who drink and use drugs." It deals with "the responsibility a friend or loved one has toward someone who has a drug or drinking problem. The spot depicts "what would happen in a lake where you might have a responsibility to do something."

[boomerchick]

The new ads appear to be folding Bush's drug wars into his faith-based initiative. Last year, at a press conference surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Islamic community leaders, Walters said: "Faith plays an important role when it comes to teen marijuana prevention. We are urging youth ministers, volunteers and faith leaders to integrate drug prevention messages and activities into their sermons and youth programming and are providing them with key tools and resources to make a difference.


At the time, Walters was announcing the launch of a new campaign called "Faith. The Anti-Drug," which indicated that the drug czar was turning down the volume from earlier anti-marijuana ad campaigns focusing on teens that linked the use of marijuana to the funding of terrorist organizations and support for terrorism.


"The reality is a lot of people don't know how to talk about these issues," said Jim Towey, the Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "According to data from Monitoring the Future, 90 percent of teens in the U.S. are affiliated with a religious denomination and 43 percent of eighth graders attend religious services weekly. Churches, temples and mosques are well positioned to cultivate anti-drug values and teach effective coping tools to deal with negative peer pressure."


Team Bush anti-drug policy encouraging intervention was spelled out in 2002. When President Bush announced his National Drug Control Strategy, FY-2003, "compassionate coercion" was the term coined and touted as a key element for success. Under the heading "Healing America's Drug Users" a White House fact sheet stated: "Getting people into treatment – including programs that call upon the power of faith – will require us to create a new climate of 'compassionate coercion,' which begins with family, friends, employers, and the community. Compassionate coercion also uses the criminal justice system to get people into treatment."


ONDCP ads are nothing if not memorable. Who can forget the message: "This is your brain on drugs," while eggs sizzle in a frying pan. And during 2002's Super Bowl the Bush Administration's $3.5 million ad buy played the Osama card, attempting to link the "war on terrorism" to the "war on drugs."


Entitled "Evaluation of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign: 2003 Report of Findings," the National Institute on Drug Abuse report points out that although the advertising campaigns have had a "favorable effect" on parents, children – whose illicit drug use is the focus of the ads – pay them little mind.


NIDA's controversial findings were compounded by reports that congressional critics "have questioned both the ads effectiveness and the use of Ogilvy, which [in 2002] ... settled for $1.8 million civil charges that it over-billed the government for its ad work on the anti-drug account," AdAge.com recently reported.


In September, the National Academy of Sciences released a study "that called for the inclusion of alcohol in the anti-drug campaign," according to AdWeek.com. "Parents tend to dramatically underestimate underage drinking generally and their own children's drinking in particular," the study said. "The beer and liquor industries have long opposed any inclusion of alcohol messages in the [anti-drug] campaign, on the basis that responsible drinking – unlike drug use – is legal for adults."

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[Swamp Gas]

'We've got to talk,' she says, holding up a bag of marijuana.

What a load of crap!

The junk these people are advertising, such as Pizza Hut, Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors, Erectile Raisers, Rogaine, and Beer are drugs, much more dangerous than pot! Just look at Dennis Miller! Brain Damaged to say the least!

Also not mentioned in this article was PETA's ad that linked heavy meat consumption with impotency and how vegetarians usually don't have that problem, and Moveon.orgs 30 second Bush winner! Super Bowl officials WOULD NOT ALLOW these two ads to be shown.

The Super Bowl is an orgy of state sponsored advertising and violence, and is the modern equivilant of the Roman Coliseum. Are we going to see that half-wit Toby Keith singing and prasing war, death, destruction, and George W Bush?

For those of us that remember Tim Leary, he said this would happen. Many of the former nude body painters, hippies, pot heads, tripsters, communal members, and Peace Lovers, are now Yuppies, and telling their kids the dangers of Non-Linear drugs. Horsecrap I say! There are 2 dangers to weed! One is the lungs if too much smoked, the other is the laws themselves. Leary said that only a handful of the 60's people would continue being that way, and the one's that were in it for the sex and drugs, would fall to the wayside, and become Yuppies.