Abstract
From 1969 through 1973, a coalition of high profile advertising agencies called the Ad Council produced a series of antidrug advertisements in support of President Richard Nixon’s policies. Among their ideas are the following: Informational scratch-and-sniff marijuana mailers, a radio spot featuring the howls of a terrified cat that supposedly had been given lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and provocative, bewildering taglines such as “When are they going to legalize pot?”
Richard Nixon’s drug policy can be analogized to a “baroque” departure from a period that historians call the “classic era” of narcotics control. In the classic era, which lasted from the 1920s through the 1960s, drug policy was punitive and treatment options were few; in contrast, Nixon’s presidency brought about a drug schedule with varying degrees of penalty for drug possession and use and a flowering of new treatment options. Yet, the aesthetic of the advertising documents associated with the Ad Council’s campaign seems closer to camp.
Journalism historian Steve Siff’s Monograph chronicles the production of the Ad Council’s antidrug spots. Throughout the Ad Council’s campaign, a series of Madison Avenue agencies aestheticized the drug problem while remaining oblivious to the scientific evidence about the dangers of various drugs. According to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” published in 1964, “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.” By the 1970s, Siff notes, vintage antidrug propaganda such as the movie Reefer Madness had become part of the camp cannon. Countercultural filmmaker Peter Fonda, serving on a federal panel reviewing the available antidrug materials, faulted the producers of educational films for their naïveté. The Ad Council’s subsequent campaign had higher production values than the films Fonda screened, but this fundamental criticism continued to apply.
Scientific experts, government officials, and various audience groups repeatedly advised the advertising agencies against using stereotypes and scare tactics. Siff calls this history a tragedy of “disasters foreseen.” This classification works on several levels. First, most of the advertisements depicted drug addiction as a literal disaster with gory consequences. Second, the ads failed, as far as we know, to alter audience behavior. Third, each production team refused to heed the warnings of experts and the lessons of history. Making sense of this story requires us to reconcile the absurdity of the Ad Council campaign’s content with the broader history of U.S. drug policy—which is also a tragedy, albeit one in which the Nixon era was only one act.
Siff describes how the closed-door debates about the Ad Council’s campaign illustrate the contradictions of Nixon-era drug policy. Nixon’s antidrug strategy was an all-out offensive on “the drug menace” that included the largest federal investment in drug treatment to date. Its sincere attempt to rationalize the drug schedule continued to classify marijuana as a narcotic while taking a more forgiving approach to prescription sedatives and stimulants. It was a largely sympathetic liberal turn in the history of U.S. drug policy that took place under a paranoid conservative president. And it was a lost opportunity to fundamentally alter the way in which the nation treated people with drug problems as outcasts and criminals who were best left for dead.
In other words, it was a turning point at which the future might have worked out better for people who use drugs. Throughout the 20th century, simplistic antidrug slogans were often delivered in a sinister drug policy context. Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger’s crusade against the “dope fiend menace” came just before the Nixon era; President Ronald Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign followed soon after. In between, the Nixon administration revolutionized addiction treatment while preserving the way people who use drugs appeared in the popular imagination.
Both treatment and antidrug media campaigns are demand-side drug control strategies, but few scholars have explored the relationship between them in depth. Journalist Michael Massing’s 1998 account of the drug war The Fix emphasizes the wisdom of President Richard Nixon’s drug advisor Jerome Jaffe, a cerebral physician and pharmacology researcher. Jaffe was instrumental in scaling methadone treatment nationwide, and stood in stark contrast to his predecessor, Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, a former football coach and commentator who appeared more interested in media events than in treatment access. In contrast, Siff’s sharp focus on media history, rather than treatment history, suggests that the differences in the experience and perspectives of these drug advisors ultimately made little impact on the Nixon administration’s antidrug promotional strategy.
Many of the Ad Council’s proposed spots slickly revived tired, Anslinger-era tropes. Throughout his reign during the classic era of narcotic control, Harry J. Anslinger famously maintained a “Gore File” filled with stories of drug users on rampages of armed burglary, rape, and murder. With help from publisher William Randolph Hearst, Anslinger placed the stories in newspapers and magazines throughout the country. In a 1940 Journal of Criminal Law article titled “Dope Fiend Mythology,” sociologist Alfred Lindesmith criticized these “sensational articles and newspaper accounts” for creating the figure of the “dope-crazed killer” or “dope fiend rapist.” Lindesmith explained that the crimes committed by people with narcotic addiction were typically nonviolent offenses carried out in support of their habit. “There is no necessary or invariable connection between the taking of any kind of drug and moral degeneration,” wrote Lindesmith, adding that this belief was so fantastical as to be “akin to witchcraft.”
But separating the sensational from the educational elements of antidrug campaigns was tricky. In Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! a 1999 book analyzing exploitation films released from 1919 to 1959, media studies scholar Eric Schaefer describes how low-budget producers disseminated Anslinger-inspired degeneration stories in movies such as Assassin of Youth, Marihuana, Reefer Madness, and She Shoulda Said “No!” The dead serious subject matter supposedly justified that explicit treatment.
By the 1970s, on-screen depictions of drug use, sex, and violence were losing their power to shock; as Siff shows, both audiences and experts had grown skeptical of the sensationalistic educational approach. In contrast, the Ad Council’s agencies seemed to conclude that the problem with the current educational material was style rather than substance. They drafted campaigns that suggested people who use drugs are “dopes” and attempted to inspire housewives who used prescription drugs to identify as “junkies.”
One element of the Ad Council’s campaign was not, from the perspective of those in the industry, disastrous: It generated millions of dollars in advertising. The Ad Council’s campaign also lived on through successors such as the Partnership for a Drug Free American (PDFA), a coalition launched by advertising agency leaders in 1986 with the stated objective to “unsell” drugs. According to Siff, “unselling” drugs was a controversial strategy in the early 1970s. Advertising executives were wary of alienating pharmaceutical, tobacco, and alcohol companies; academics and policy advisors were doubtful it would work. Both forms of concern had abated by the 1980s. The PDFA helped place moral degeneration plotlines in popular television shows and produced a memorable public service advertisement (PSA) featuring the tag line “No one ever says, ‘I want to be a junkie when I grow up.’” In the PSA, childhood dreams to become a track star, a ballerina, and a nurse are juxtaposed with images of arrests and overdoses. Antidrug campaigns of the 1980s rarely presented the possibility that one could overcome drug dependence and achieve a fulfilling life and career.
My 2017 book The Recovery Revolution shows how this popular conception was partly the responsibility of recovering activists. Beginning in the 1960s, self-described “ex-addicts” participated in national public relations campaigns, sacrificing a claim to humanity in exchange for the chance to convince the public that addiction treatment works. These activists promoted their preferred treatment model (the one they had experienced): The “therapeutic community” (TC), a long-term, peer-led, authoritarian, residential treatment based in the moral philosophy that people who are addicted to drugs are immature and need to be “habilitated”—their term for complete re-socialization. The goal of TC treatment centers was nothing less than total personal transformation, and recovered advocates often distanced themselves from their pasts by playing into “dope fiend” stereotypes. They called themselves “dope fiends” who had reformed into “ex-addicts.” They defined addiction as a “disease of stupidity” from which they had been reeducated. It is not difficult to imagine their answer to the question “Why do you think they call it dope?”
To the degree that these advocates were able to leverage public attention to obtain local and federal funds for addiction treatment and research, the strategy worked. But, as Siff shows, some ad executives in the 1970s preferred to view former drug users as “scare tactics” rather than as people. By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s drug advisor Carlton Turner wanted to wipe the campaigns clean of them.
First Lady Nancy Reagan’s antidrug campaign began with visits to TCs that primarily treated adult users of hard, illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Turner determined that it would be more politically palatable for the First Lady to concentrate on preventing drug problems in children and adolescents. “You cannot be certain they, especially reformed heroin users, will not go back to using drugs,” he wrote in an internal memo urging Nancy Reagan’s adviser to focus the First Lady’s attention on the “starter drugs,” alcohol and marijuana, and on at-risk youth. Few in the Reagan administration stopped to consider the criticism that antidrug campaigns might have unintended consequences, especially if they are not first systematically assessed.
The observation that “dope fiend” rhetoric might work against the public interests of people in treatment and recovery was later confirmed in research conducted in partnership with the advocacy group Faces and Voices of Recovery: Researchers found that most such people did not have a positive view of recovery. Although the recovery movement of the early 21st century would begin to consciously model itself on the gay rights movement, the earlier attempts by some in the treatment community to reclaim terms such as “ex-addict” as a form of empowerment backfired. In this case, camp was no catalyst for liberation.