<DOC>
[107th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:86964.wais]
NATIONAL YOUTH ANTI-DRUG MEDIA CAMPAIGN
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE,
DRUG POLICY AND HUMAN RESOURCES
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JUNE 25, 2002
__________
Serial No. 107-207
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
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____________________________________________________________________________
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland TOM LANTOS, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
STEPHEN HORN, California PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
JOHN L. MICA, Florida CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana DC
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
BOB BARR, Georgia DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
DAN MILLER, Florida ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
DOUG OSE, California DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
RON LEWIS, Kentucky JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JIM TURNER, Texas
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
DAVE WELDON, Florida JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida DIANE E. WATSON, California
C.L. ``BUTCH'' OTTER, Idaho STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia ------
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma (Independent)
Kevin Binger, Staff Director
Daniel R. Moll, Deputy Staff Director
James C. Wilson, Chief Counsel
Robert A. Briggs, Chief Clerk
Phil Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
JOHN L. MICA, Florida, BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
BOB BARR, Georgia DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
DAN MILLER, Florida JIM TURNER, Texas
DOUG OSE, California THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JANICE D. SCHAKOWKY, Illinois
DAVE WELDON, Florida
Ex Officio
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Christopher A. Donesa, Staff Director
Sharon Pinkerton, Professional Staff Member
Conn Carroll, Clerk
Julian A. Haywood, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on June 25, 2002.................................... 1
Statement of:
Johnston, Lloyd D., distinguished research scientist, Survey
Research Center, University of Michigan; Philip Palmgreen,
professor, Department of Communication, University of
Kentucky; Hon. Rob Portman, a Representative in Congress
from the State of Ohio; Susan Patrick, president, the
Governor's Prevention Partnership; and Paul J. Zimmerman,
senior manager, corporate function consumer of market
0 knowledge, Procter and Gamble.............................. 7
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Johnston, Lloyd D., distinguished research scientist, Survey
Research Center, University of Michigan, prepared statement
of......................................................... 10
Palmgreen, Philip, professor, Department of Communication,
University of Kentucky, prepared statement of.............. 20
Patrick, Susan, president, the Governor's Prevention
Partnership, prepared statement of......................... 42
Souder, Hon. Mark E., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Indiana, prepared statement of.................... 3
Zimmerman, Paul J., senior manager, corporate function
consumer of market knowledge, Procter and Gamble, prepared
statement of............................................... 48
NATIONAL YOUTH ANTI-DRUG MEDIA CAMPAIGN
----------
TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 2002
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and
Human Resources,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in
room 2247, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Mark E. Souder
(chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Souder, Cummings, Barr, Gilman,
and Mica.
Staff present: Christopher Donesa, staff director and chief
counsel; Sharon Pinkerton, professional staff member; Conn
Carroll, clerk; Julian A. Haywood, minority counsel; and Jean
Gosa, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Souder. The subcommittee will come to order.
Good morning. In announcing the national drug control
strategy for this year, President Bush said the following:
``More than 50 percent of our high school seniors have said
that they have experimented with illegal drugs at least once
prior to graduation. There are some new hip drugs like ecstasy
and GHB that are kind of fads. But they're dangerous and
lethal, and they're taking too many lives.''
President Bush continued, ``And we know the results, we
know what can happen. The important bonds between parents and
children are fractured and broken, sometimes forever. Schools
can turn into places of violence and chaos, as opposed to
places of learning and hope. Productive citizens can be so
dependent, so addicted that they live a life of hopelessness.
We've got to do something about it here in America.''
As part of the same announcement, the President said ``It
is important for Americans and American families to understand
this: that the best way to affect supply is to reduce demand
for dugs, to convince our children that the use of drugs is
destructive in their lives.'' One of the specific programs that
President Bush noted was the National Youth Anti-Drug Media
Campaign, which is budgeted for $180 million this year. Under
the media campaign, the Federal Government buys advertising
time to reach American youth with the message that drug use
should be rejected.
Like the President, I have supported this program, because
I believe that it is one of the cornerstones of our integrated
national strategy to prevent teen and later adult drug use.
Recent weeks have brought more troubling news about the media
campaign. The last periodic evaluation of its results suggested
that the advertisements have not had a directly measurable
effect in persuading adolescents. Director Walters of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy was quoted the next day
in the Wall Street Journal as flatly stating that this campaign
isn't reducing drug use.
When coupled with other issues, such as the continued
implications of the billing irregularities previously revealed
in the program, it is clear that significant questions must
eventually be addressed and resolved as a prerequisite to any
authorization of the program in this subcommittee. The most
useful way to begin the reauthorization process, however, is to
start with the fundamentals.
Today's hearing is intended to review the most fundamental
question of all: do we need an anti-drug media campaign? I
believe that the answer to this question is yes, because it is
one of a limited number of major prevention programs in the
United States, but also because we must watch the social
messages our kids receive by fighting fire with fire in the
public arena.
Our witnesses today will give their views on the issue,
including several reasons why they believe that at the
conceptual level, a media campaign is necessary and can be
successful. My friend and co-chair of the Speaker's Drug Task
Force on a Drug-Free America, Congressman Rob Portman of Ohio,
was to be our first panel. He is tied up and we will have him
join this panel when he gets there, but we'll go ahead with the
second panel. He has been a leader in the Nation's demand
reduction efforts and recently has been giving careful study to
this program, in addition to his many other responsibilities,
working as President Bush's liaison on Capitol Hill.
Our second panel, now our first panel, will feature
prevention professionals and academics from around the country,
including Dr. Lloyd Johnston of the University of Michigan, the
principal investigator for the Monitoring the Future study
tracking adolescent drug use; Professor Philip Palmgreen, of
the University of Kentucky, who has authored a study on the
effect of public service advertisements on teens; Susan
Patrick, of the Governor's Prevention Partnership for the State
of Connecticut; and Mr. Paul Zimmerman of the Procter and
Gamble Corp., who has been active in the Community Coalition
for a Drug-Free Cincinnati.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Mark E. Souder follows:]
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Mr. Souder. We welcome you all and look forward to your
testimony on this important issue. I would now like to
recognize Mr. Cummings for an opening statement.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy's Youth Anti-
Drug Media Campaign plays an important role in our Government's
efforts to reduce the demand for illegal drugs. The goal of the
campaign is to halt drug use before it starts by spreading the
word and encouraging the belief that illegal drug use is
harmful and inconsistent with success in life.
The campaign also stresses the importance of frank and
honest discussion about drugs among parents and their children.
The campaign as we know it began in 1997, when the Partnership
for a Drug-Free America turned to President Clinton and
Congress for Federal support of its pioneering drug prevention
effort. For a decade, the Partnership had been successful in
soliciting millions of dollars in creative ad content from
advertising firms and valuable free air time from the major
networks to produce a series of hard-hitting public service
announcements aimed at discouraging teen drug use.
The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future survey,
moreover, showed that the ads were not only making an
impression, but they were actually changing attitudes and
behavior for the better. When deregulation in the television
industry caused free air time to dry up, Congress stepped up to
the plate and gave ONDCP $185 million to place pro bono ads on
TV. We subsequently reauthorized the campaign which has since
grown into a comprehensive media effort involving Web sites,
entertainment industry outreach efforts, and an array of
things, in addition to television advertising.
Five years later, we are here asking, do we need an anti-
drug media campaign? In my view the answer is simply yes.
Illegal drug consumption continues to tear at the fabric of our
communities, and we need to do everything we can to convince
our young people to stay away from illegal drugs.
An effective anti-drug media campaign should, without
question, continue to be a part of our Federal drug control and
prevention strategy. The operative word, of course, is
effective. We have understood that from the very beginning.
That is why Congress mandated that the National Institute for
Drug Abuse design an evaluation competent to measure the
campaign's impact on the attitudes and behavior of youth and
their parents. The most recent data from NIDA tell us that the
ads are sticking and that they are causing parents to take a
more active role in counseling their children about drugs.
The data does not show, however, that the ads are causing
use of marijuana to decline among youth. Unfortunately, these
mixed results have led to some rather gloomy public appraisals
of a campaign by ONDCP Director John Walters, who has emerged
as the campaign's harshest public critic.
It is clear enough that the campaign requires some
retooling. And Director Walters has suggested a number of steps
that might be taken to improve the campaign's effectiveness, as
has the Partnership. We must evaluate the options before us
carefully, but even more importantly, we must undertake this
effort with a firm determination to see that this campaign
succeeds.
In private meetings with myself and other members and in
public testimony before the appropriations subcommittees in the
House and Senate, Mr. Walters has indicated he remains
committed to the campaign. So I would argue, should we in
Congress be committed also? We must make the case to our
colleagues. Helping us to lay a foundation for that case today
are several individuals with valuable expertise and experience
in the area of anti-drug media campaigns and their impact on
drug use and attitudes toward drugs.
One of them is Congressman Rob Portman of Ohio, who
believes that the campaign is making a difference for the
better in his hometown of Cincinnati. Congressman Portman and I
have been working with our Senate colleagues, Joe Biden and
Orrin Hatch, to craft legislation to reauthorize the ONDCP
media campaign. I think it is fair to say that we share the
belief that Federal support for an anti-drug media campaign
must continue. It is the right thing to do, and it can be done
effectively, as it has been done before.
I look forward to hearing the testimony of all of our
witnesses today, and I look forward to working with you, Mr.
Chairman, and the rest of our colleagues, to make the media
campaign as effective as it can be. Thank you.
Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Before proceeding, I would like to take care of a couple of
procedural matters. First, I ask unanimous consent that all
Members have 5 legislative days to submit written statements
and questions for the hearing record, and that any answers to
written questions provided by the witnesses also be included in
the record. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Second, I ask unanimous consent that all exhibits,
documents and other materials referred to by Members and the
witnesses may be included in the hearing record, and that all
Members be permitted to revise and extend their remarks.
Without objection, it is so ordered.
Would the witnesses on this panel each stand up? It's been
a longstanding practice in our committee that we swear the
witnesses in. If you'll raise your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Souder. Thank you. Let the record show that the
witnesses have each answered in the affirmative.
We're looking forward to your testimony. As you have
gleaned, if you didn't know before, this committee is unusual
in the sense that we're an oversight committee, but in this
case of this program, we're also the authorizing. We're trying
to figure out what things might need to be changed in the
definition of this campaign, so we're very much looking forward
to your testimony.
Dr. Johnston, if you would start.
STATEMENTS OF LLOYD D. JOHNSTON, DISTINGUISHED RESEARCH
SCIENTIST, SURVEY RESEARCH CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN;
PHILIP PALMGREEN, PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION,
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY; HON. ROB PORTMAN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OHIO; SUSAN PATRICK, PRESIDENT, THE
GOVERNOR'S PREVENTION PARTNERSHIP; AND PAUL J. ZIMMERMAN,
SENIOR MANAGER, CORPORATE FUNCTION CONSUMER OF MARKET
KNOWLEDGE, PROCTER AND GAMBLE
Mr. Johnston. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Congressman
Cummings. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to testify
before you this morning on the National Youth Anti-Drug
Campaign.
My name is Lloyd Johnston. I'm a program director and
distinguished research scientist at the University of
Michigan's Institute for Social Research, where for the past 28
years, I've directed the Monitoring the Future Study that you
referred to, both of you, in your opening comments.
Much of my testimony, in fact, will be based on results
from that study, so I'd like to start by just taking a moment
to say a few words about what it is. This is a research grant
that's funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. As I
say, it's been going on for 28 years. And we do national
samples of 8th, 10th and 12th grade students around the country
each year, roughly ages 13 to 18, so basically the teen years.
At present, some 45,000 students are surveyed each year,
and they're asked about their use of a wide array of
substances, and it's a wide array that they have available
today, as well as related attitudes and beliefs and
experiences. Specifically related to the current issue, we ask
them, and have since 1987, how frequently they see the anti-
drug commercials or spots on radio and television and about the
extent to which they feel these commercials have made them
personally less likely to use drugs. So it's their own judgment
about impact.
My comments are organized around a set of charts to my
right. I'll mention to the audience that the same charts are in
the testimony that's on the table.
Chart one contains the long term trends in marijuana use
for students in 8th, 10th and 12th grades. It goes back over a
26 year period. I want you to note a couple of things about
this, and it's true of the other drugs that I don't have up on
charts. There's a great deal of variability over time. These
have not proven to be immutable behaviors. They're subject to a
range of social influences and change has occurred. If I put
the line up there for delinquency, for example, it would be
much flatter.
Notice also that use leveled off in about 1996 or 1997, in
all three grades, after a period of increase. And in fact,
there has been some fairly steady decline among the eighth
graders in their marijuana use since then. This most recent
year, 2001, didn't show any further decline.
Chart two shows the similar trends for illicit drugs other
than marijuana taken as a group, the proportion of kids who
used something beyond marijuana. It has fairly similar trends
over time and note that there has been some progress since 1998
when the Federal campaign began for the eighth graders in
particular, who have shown declines. And for a number of the
specific drugs that are in the class, that I don't have up
here, there have been important declines. Inhalants, LSD,
heroin, cocaine, crack, some of the most serious drugs, have
actually shown improvements during this period.
I note that the report that you alluded to from Weststat
and Annenberg only deals with marijuana, not with all these
other drugs.
I don't have any charts on the various individual drugs,
but if I did, what they would show is that there is a great
deal of individuality in their cross-time profiles of change.
This suggests that there are drug-specific influences driving
their levels. Two powerful influences that we have identified
in this study are perceived risk, how much kids think they are
harmful, and their disapproval.
Turning to our findings about the media campaign, chart
three shows the trends in reported weekly exposure by students
to anti-drug commercials on TV and radio. Note first of all the
gradual decline in the early 1990's as the pro bono placement
waned, and then a sharp increase in 1999 as the Federal program
kicked in to buy space and time. But right after that, pretty
much a leveling. In fact, the level has not yet reached where
it was in the heyday of the pro bono campaign in the early
1990's.
Chart four shows trends in the students' reactions to the
campaign: students are asked to what extent the ads made them
personally less likely to use drugs. And the majority of
students at all three grade levels credited the ad campaigns
with having at least some deterrent influence on their drug
use. Substantial portions credit the ad campaign with having a
lot of influence: and in fact, 48 percent of the eighth graders
say that. I think that's most advertisers' dream, to get that
much impact self-reported by the target audience.
The proportion of eighth graders reporting effects has
risen steadily since 1997 as exposure has increased for them.
But note that the older kids have not shown an increase in
reported impact. That suggests to me that we've lost some
salience with the older kids, because they should be showing
more impact with more exposure.
Chart five shows one particular drug where I think there is
quite compelling evidence of impact, and that's inhalants. The
Partnership for a Drug-Free America, before the Federal
campaign set in, had an anti-inhalant campaign that was
initiated in 1995, largely because of our calling attention to
the continuing increase in inhalant use. And the proportion of
students who said there was a great risk in using inhalants,
even once or twice, jumped up in that year, as you can see. And
that was at a point where practically no other drugs were
turning down. So it wasn't part of a larger trend.
Chart six, the final chart, shows that inhalant use, which
had been gradually rising for virtually a 20 year period, began
to decline in 1996, at the same time that the campaign kicked
in, and has been declining since, as much as 45 percent in some
grades.
So, in conclusion, I think there's evidence that media
campaigns can and do have deterrent effects. There's also
evidence in other domains, I might add, like alcohol and
tobacco. So I hope we're careful not to throw out the baby with
the bathwater here. Just because one preliminary report dealing
with a single drug out of the very many that we now have,
covering a very short period of time, 18 months, and focused on
a particular implementation of the media strategy, which was
whatever was done in those 18 months, just because that study
fails to find evidence of effects is certainly not sufficient
reason to give up on the entire enterprise.
I've tried to show evidence that would lead to a quite
different conclusion about the need and desirability for having
a vigorous and sustained anti-drug media campaign. It's one of
the very few tools that we have for reducing demand, and I
think it can be effective. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Johnston follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Professor Palmgreen.
Mr. Palmgreen. Well, I was told, I have to apologize, that
there was going to be Power Point available today. And there is
no Power Point available today, so I think the members of the
committee will have to follow along with the handout of my
slides, which is what I'm going to use. I have to apologize to
the audience for not being able to see these.
My name is Phil Palmgreen. I'm a professor of communication
at the University of Kentucky. I've been doing research with a
number of colleagues there for the last 15 years on anti-drug
public service announcements specifically, funded by the
National Institute on Drug Abuse. NIDA has been very interested
in the impact of these kinds of PSAs.
I'm going to report to you today on one of those studies,
probably our most important study, which assesses the impact of
televised PSA campaigns on at-risk teens' marijuana use. And
that was the only component of this campaign, anti-drug public
service announcement, because NIDA wanted to know if those PSAs
worked. And it's difficult to tell if you have a multi-
component campaign that includes schools, community efforts and
so forth. So we just ran a PSA campaign only as the purest test
of the possible impact of such a campaign.
In a nutshell, our research shows that a scientifically
targeted television campaign can reduce marijuana use among at-
risk youth. Now, a key element of these campaigns was something
called sensation seeking. Sensation seeking is a personality
trait that's been studied in hundreds of studies over the last
40 years or so. It involves a need for novel and emotionally
intense stimulation. High sensation seekers just need a lot
more of that than low sensation seekers.
It also involves a willingness to take risks for such
stimulation. It's about 60 percent inherited, which means that
for many people, their brains are hard-wired to become high
sensation seekers. It's moderately to strongly associated with
all kinds of substance use, from cigarettes and alcohol up the
hardest drug, and I'll show you some of that in a moment.
Also, high sensation seekers make up about 50 percent of
the population as defined by most researchers. It's not a small
group of people. How do you identify high sensation seekers?
Usually through a small scale, we developed a short version
that we can use with kids. It has items in it like, I would
like to explore strange places, I prefer friends who are
excitingly unpredictable, I like to do frightening things, I
like wild parties and so on. People who agree with those kinds
of items tend to be high sensation seekers.
Now, I said that high sensation seekers use a lot more
drugs and a lot more of a particular drug than low sensation
seekers. I have some data from the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America, who has an attitude tracking survey that they do
annually of about 7,000 kids, a nationally representative
sample, 7th to 12th graders. For example, for marijuana, among
those 7th to 12th graders, about 2\1/2\ times as many high
sensation seekers as low sensation seekers use marijuana. And
that's really an underestimate, because that's an average
across 7th to 12th grades. And in 7th grades, there's very
little difference between high and low sensation seekers.
By the 12th grade, there's usually a much bigger
difference, about as high as four to one in favor of the high
sensation seekers. But you also see those same kinds of ratios
for alcohol, cigarettes, inhalants, for example, inhalants is
3.3 to one, cocaine. When you look at lifetime use of some of
the harder drugs, like meth, which is such a troubling drug
today, it's almost four to one in favor of high sensation
seekers using it in the last 30 days. Ecstacy, three to one.
So in other words, sensation seeking really is, we have
found it to be a particularly effective variable for targeting
those who are most in need of hearing the message, the anti-
drug message. Now, how do you reach these people? Because
they're not easy to reach.
There happens to be a fortuitous circumstance, and that is
that high sensation seekers, it turns out, in their need for
stimulation, also require stronger messages to get their
attention and to persuade them. These messages ordinarily are
novel, dramatic, emotionally powerful, graphic, unconventional
and certainly not preachy, as you might expect. Without these
kinds of characteristics, we have found that you can't even get
the attention of high sensation seekers, much less persuade
them.
The study I'm talking about was carried out in Lexington,
Kentucky and Knoxville, TN. They are, it turns out, two very
comparable communities. It had two principal goals. One was to
study the impact of televised PSA campaigns on at-risk teens'
marijuana use, especially among high sensation seekers, and to
try to interrupt or even reverse the normally observed age
related upward trends in teen marijuana use that you ordinarily
see.
The study's principal design features included PSAs
developed or selected for appeal to high sensation seekers. We
did a lot of research on that. We developed our own five PSAs.
We had a few PSAs from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America
as well, but they didn't get much air time, because the
Partnership at that time was operating strictly on a pro bono
basis. We were buying time for our own PSAs, so our own five
PSAs that we developed had to carry the load.
The PSAs were placed in programming with high sensation
seeking appeal, according to our surveys. High exposure also,
we had high exposure to the PSAs, a combination of purchased
and donated time. We also used a powerful control time series
design to measure behavior change in high sensation seekers.
That's probably the most powerful design available for this
kind of study.
The study itself involved 6,400 adolescents, approximately.
We started gathering data, started sampling 100 kids per month
in Lexington, Kentucky and Knoxville, Tennessee. We did that
for 32 months, sampling from the same cohort of kids as they
got older. They were 7th to 10th grade when we started, 32
months later, this same cohort of kids was in what we call the
10th through 13th grade, or the grade after graduation from
high school.
We started gathering data 8 months prior to the first
campaign, which was carried out in Lexington, Kentucky, a 4-
month campaign in the spring of 1997. A year later, we did a
booster campaign in Lexington, Kentucky and we ran a campaign,
the same kind of campaign, same ads, in Knoxville, Tennessee.
So we were able to plot trends in use of marijuana, 30 day use
of marijuana, to see if the campaigns affected these trends,
both before, during and after the campaign, a unique feature of
this study.
Finally, look at the results here, unfortunately some of
you in the audience will have to look at the handout that I've
passed around, there are two charts here, one for Knoxville,
Tennessee, where we only ran one campaign. What you see there,
there is some sampling error due to the small sample sizes. But
we divided the samples into high sensation seekers and low
sensation seekers. If you look at the circles at the bottom,
that's the low sensation seekers. They're just sort of not
using much marijuana. Average use of about 7 percent in the
last 30 days, and they're not going up over that 32 month
period.
High sensation seekers, on the other hand, went up from
about 16 percent use to 20 months later, before the first
campaign started, they went up, they doubled, went up to almost
33 percent. That's a typical age related increase that you see.
Our campaign started in January 1998 in Knoxville. They
immediately started down. And they were still going down 8
months after the campaign ended.
In Lexington, where you have a more complex pattern,
because you have two campaigns, once again, low sensation
seekers going along the bottom, not using much. But the high
sensation seekers, that 50 percent of the population we were
studying, were going up like a rocket, basically, to start
with. Then they encountered our first campaign in 1997. Down
they went.
Then 6 months after that campaign, that campaign had a
wear-out effect, like you usually see with product advertising.
And they started back up again. So we hit them with the booster
campaign. And down they went again. And they were still going
down at the end of the campaign.
So we estimate that there was a 27 to 36 percent decline in
the proportion of high sensation seeking teens using marijuana
in the past 30 days in these two communities. That's a
substantial decrease.
What are the implications? What did we learn from all this?
That we think televised PSAs emphasizing marijuana risks,
because that's what we did, and one of the things I guess I
failed to mention was that we only used PSAs that involved
risks, marijuana risks, risks scientifically documented and
risks that high sensation seekers told us were very important
in their lives, such as damaged relationships with family and
friends, decreased academic and sports performance, loss of
part-time jobs, impaired memory and judgment, reduced
motivation, depression, lung damage and so forth. We put those
things into our PSAs.
So our study speaks to PSAs that feature marijuana risks
and we feel those kinds of campaigns can substantially reduce
marijuana use among at-risk teens. To be successful, we think
these kinds of campaigns should be designed specifically for
at-risk teens,
especially high sensation seekers. And they should achieve high
levels of audience penetration and exposure, that's important.
And finally, we feel that our results show rather
dramatically that TV campaigns can play an important, very cost
effective role in preventing teen marijuana use. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Palmgreen follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you. We've been joined by our colleague
from Ohio, who has been the Republican leader on demand
reduction. It's a privilege to have you here, Congressman Rob
Portman.
Mr. Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize that I
was delayed getting here earlier, but delighted that I got to
hear some of Professor Palmgreen's testimony. I'm sorry I
missed Dr. Johnston's, who is really one of the great
researchers in this area. His work is viewed as the seminal
survey work in this area and has been for 15 or so years. I
look forward to hearing more from our other panelists. You've
got a great panel here, including my colleague from Cincinnati,
Paul Zimmerman.
Ranking Member Cummings and Mr. Barr and Mr. Chairman, I
thank you for having this hearing. This is very important that
we have a hearing just about what the heck a media campaign can
do and should do, and to back up a little bit and talk about
why Congress made that big decision back in 1998 to get into
this area of helping to encourage and to be sure that we had a
strong media campaign out there. I enjoyed working with you,
Mr. Chairman, and Chairman Burton on the reauthorization of the
Drug-Free Media Campaign, Mr. Cummings as well, and I look
forward to working with you to tackle this new issue we have
before us, which is reauthorizing the media campaign in a way
that makes sense.
I also want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your personal
commitment to this and your commitment to substance abuse
across the board, demand and supply side. I think this hearing
recognizes the importance of the media campaign to the country,
and it recognizes we're not going to cede the health, safety
and lives of our children to the dangers of illegal drug use. I
think that's very important, just as a statement.
I think we all agree that there's no silver bullet in this
business. There's no magic solution that's going to enable us
to stop drug use overnight. But we also, I think, all agree
that a very important way to get the message across is through
public media, and that includes television, radio and
newspapers. I personally am a firm believer, as you know, Mr.
Chairman, that an effective media campaign can help, as we just
heard based on good survey data, to help keep kids off drugs.
The Partnership, of course, operated a successful campaign
long before we got involved in 1998. Congress, in 1998
understood the importance of that and wanted to ensure that it
would continue under more difficult circumstances. So we came
up with the idea to use Federal dollars on a matching basis to
purchase media time to air anti-drug ads. These ads would be
prepared by the best in the business, the best creative talent
and the Partnership was asked to help ensure that creative
production process would continue to be there on a pro bono
basis, which was part of the cost effectiveness of the
campaign. By doing so, we had hoped that the free creative
would result in not only the best work but a cost savings to
the taxpayer.
We knew we had to purchase the actual advertising time, but
even there, we realized the taxpayers would get a strong return
on that investment, because we were going to be sure that every
dollar spent on media buys would be matched by the private
sector. And again, as was just noted in terms of the cost
effectiveness, if you look at the other things we're doing in
prevention or treatment, or for that matter on the supply side,
as Professor Palmgreen has said, this is a very cost effective
way to deal with these issues.
Since 1998, ONDCP has run its campaign. With the help of
the Partnership, they've created more than 212 commercials.
Some have said the campaign has lost its way. Many of us of
course are familiar with the criticism that John Walters, the
Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy,
recently had to the media campaign based on the NIDA study.
There are questions about the methodology used in that
study, I'm sure you're going to get into that today. I'll let
your experts testify to that. But even if you support the
methodology and even support the results of this latest survey,
it's not all bad news, which is how the media portrayed it
often. For instance, there were very positive outcomes with
parents. More parents were seeing the ads, more parents were
talking to their kids about drugs as a result. And we have
found in our work back home and even nationally this is a vital
element. Probably the single most important thing we could do
is just to get parents more engaged in the lives of their kids
and talking to their kids about the consequences of drug use,
dealing with it. And that has been successful in these ads.
Unfortunately, other aspects of the NIDA study were not as
positive, and of course, we're not seeing the decrease in the
percentage of teenagers using drugs that we'd like to see.
I'm here to tell you, Mr. Chairman, that I'm willing to
work with the subcommittee in whatever way possible. I know
you're committed to this as well, to make sure that the ad
campaign is made more effective. I'm convinced that it can be
done. I say this because of the proven ability of public
service campaigns around the country on various issues. Again,
we just heard testimony to that.
But I also speak from first-hand knowledge in our own
community, because we've seen the positive results that can be
gained by an effective media campaign. We started the Coalition
for a Drug-Free Greater Cincinnati about 6 or 7 years ago. I
founded it as chairman. And we recently conducted a survey, we
do a survey every 2 years. Our recent survey showed a decline
in teen drug use in our region for the first time in a dozen
years.
So for the first time in 12 years we're seeing a decline.
And it's a fairly substantial decline, marijuana use down 13
percent, alcohol use down 24 percent among teens, cigarette use
among teens down 28 percent. We coordinate back in Cincinnati
an extensive local anti-drug media campaign. We've been very
successful in getting TV stations, radio stations involved.
We've had over $1 million donated in free time every year for
the past 3 years, making it one of the most aggressive anti-
drug media campaigns in the country, we think the most
aggressive in terms of a city our size and our market.
We think it's working. Our survey has shown that kids who
have seen the anti-drug ads on a regular basis are 20 percent
less likely to use. Paul will go into more detail on that in
terms of the methodology. But this survey, we think, is the
best local survey out there. It's almost like a census rather
than a survey. We have 67,000 kids from 123 greater Cincinnati
schools now involved in our survey. So it's a huge sample, and
it means that we're able to get to a pretty fine point in terms
of the variations. So we feel good about the survey and its
methodology.
We know that prevention and education tools like the media
campaign work, based on the survey. We need to keep the effort
going. Again, you're going to hear from Paul, and he was the
mastermind behind how to put this survey together so we could
benchmark and compare it to Dr. Johnston's work, Monitoring the
Future, other national surveys, as well as all the local survey
work that had been done in our area over the last decade.
A lot of different ideas, Mr. Chairman, have come up as to
how to improve the national media campaign. Among those are
focusing on older kids, centering the campaign more on
marijuana, ensuring that every single ad, not just most ads,
are tested before they air. All these seem sensible to me. They
all seem like good ideas. The key is that we work together on a
bipartisan basis to keep the good ads on the air as part of a
complementary prevention and demand reduction effort.
I'm hopeful and confident that this and other hearings will
give us the guidance we need to be able to move forward with
that and draft a reauthorization bill that will indeed result
in a more effective campaign to assure that we keep our kids
drug-free. And I thank you again for giving me the opportunity
to testify today.
Mr. Souder. Thank you for your testimony. We were
originally going to have you on a separate panel, so if you
need to leave at any time, feel free to do so.
We'll now go to Susan Patrick. Thank you for coming today.
Ms. Patrick. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank
you very much for this opportunity to testify today.
I've been in the prevention field for over 25 years, and
I'm currently the President of the Governor's Prevention
Partnership, which is a bipartisan, public-private alliance in
Connecticut founded in 1989. The organization is currently co-
chaired by Governor John Rowland and by the CEO of People's
Bank, John Klein. Our board includes business and community
leaders and the State's legislative leadership. Our mission is
to lead a State-wide movement to keep Connecticut's youth drug-
free and safe.
So I am here today to speak to the impact of the campaign
in one State. We do a variety of programs which include a media
partnership, programs that teach parents how to talk to their
children about drugs, and that has been significantly motivated
by the campaign, a State-wide mentoring initiative, and a
State-wide coalition to drop underage drinking.
Our organization has been affiliated with the Partnership
for a Drug-Free America since 1991, and we are strongly
committed to delivering anti-drug messages to Connecticut youth
and their parents. Through our network of more than 90 media
partners and with the support of the Partnership, we too have
garnered more than $1 million each year in pro bono support.
While we are proud of the support from Connecticut's media,
we recognize its limitations in consistently and frequently
reaching our target audiences. When we received word of the
ONDCP anti-drug media campaign, we were thrilled. I haven't
been that excited in ages. Pro bono support had declined and
drug use was going up. In fact, marijuana use in our eighth
graders had just tripled.
Connecticut was selected as one of the 12 pilot sites for
the campaign. And I can tell you first hand, it worked
phenomenally. Calls to our 1-800 number quadrupled during the
first 3 months. Businesses began calling and asking us to
deliver lunchtime talks on drug prevention. Law enforcement
professionals and chief elected officials called to request
copies of campaign materials to distribute to the citizens in
their communities.
ONDCP's formal evaluation of the Connecticut pilot found
that key community influencers in Connecticut were aware of and
supported the campaign and youth and that parents reported a
higher level of awareness of anti-drug messages, particularly
those on television and radio.
In addition, this campaign provided fertile ground for our
organization to significantly expand its parent education work.
We believe parents are key to drug prevention, but reaching
them and involving them and getting them to actually talk with
their kids has been challenging. I would go to panels on
schools for parent education programs where more panelists were
there than parents.
Through a program called Parents Work! we partner with
businesses to provide onsite lunchtime seminars for their
employees. We train them in how to talk to their children about
drugs, alcohol, violence, bullying and most recently, how to
deal with the traumatic effects of September 11th. The campaign
was instrumental in bringing the issue of parents, kids and
drugs to the forefront of business interests, because motivated
by the ads, employees were asking for it.
We have since delivered the program to 5,000 employees in
250 businesses. Our evaluation shows that there is a 71 percent
increase in the number of parents who say they will talk to
their children about drugs and who feel prepared to do so, and
a 57 percent decrease in parents who believe they have no
influence on a child's decision to use drugs.
Overall, in Connecticut, we know this campaign works and we
urge you to continue full funding. We also urge you to return
the campaign to the principles and practices that guided it in
the first couple of years. During that period, from our 1997
survey to our 2000 survey, past month marijuana use declined
from 10.5 percent to just over 7 percent among Connecticut's
seventh and eighth graders and dropped from 27 percent to 22
percent among ninth and tenth graders.
You've heard testimony on what makes a campaign like this
effective. I'm not a researcher, but I can tell you what I've
observed is the end result. When the campaign began to wander
and the frequency of spots went down, especially when the local
buy was eliminated, kids' attitudes began to soften, especially
toward marijuana. Not only were they not seeing as many anti-
drug ads, but they were and are being influenced by the
national movement to legalize marijuana, which they
increasingly see as a harmless drug.
While we are all deeply concerned about the threat of
terrorism, we are equally concerned about our children's
future. As more Federal resources are directed toward homeland
security and as States grapple with their own budget crises, it
becomes even more critical to invest our limited dollars
wisely. As you probably know, each dollar invested in
prevention saves $15, double what we actually save from an
investment in treatment.
This campaign is a wise and necessary investment. But the
investment must be guided by good business practices. This
campaign must be structured to produce results, and there are
several things I'd like to suggest to do this. First, return to
the strategy of focused messages crafted by advertising
professionals. Second, make sure that the ads are seen often
enough to have an impact by increasing the amount of campaign
dollars directed to media buys at the national and at the local
level.
Third, continue to require a pro bono media match. Fourth,
partner with organizations like ours to leverage an even wider
distribution of the ads. For example, last year we reached more
than 12,000 parents with campaign messages by partnering with
faith-based organizations who included them in their bulletins,
libraries who set up special displays and schools who sent them
home with students.
Our organization is thankful for the congressional support
that has allowed widespread anti-drug media exposure. We
appreciate the foresight Congress has shown in the fight
against illegal drug use, and we urge a recommitment of these
efforts to the full funding of the campaign under these
conditions.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Patrick follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you very much.
Mr. Zimmerman, we're going to let you bat cleanup on the
Cincinnati campaign.
Mr. Zimmerman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the
subcommittee. My name is Paul Zimmerman, from Cincinnati, OH.
As a volunteer, I am responsible as Vice President for
Programs of the Coalition for Greater Cincinnati, for designing
and analyzing the results of our usage survey, which we've
done, and then making sure that those results are understood
and implemented by our various subcommittees. For my day job, I
work for Procter and Gamble company, for the past 26 years,
where I am in the market research department. Germane to my
recommendation on my written survey, I was responsible for the
validation of our copy testing system, which we use at Procter
and Gamble, where we can evaluate copy before it goes on air,
and then determine whether or not it has a probability of
building business.
I wish to discuss very briefly the results of drug usage in
greater Cincinnati, because I feel that our results are
applicable to many communities around the United States. Our
usage trends that we have seen are fairly typical. The monthly
usage of marijuana, alcohol, tobacco and other drugs are fairly
typical compared to other communities in the United States. We
too have seen, as Rob said, a decrease in monthly usage of all
drugs locally. That is shown in table one.
Table two demonstrates, when we look at risk and protective
factors, that the level of protective factors, such as parents
talking to their children about drugs, parents setting rules,
children attending church and finally, seeing anti-drug media,
are fairly reasonable. We see that proportionally, about two-
thirds of students, similar to some of the other results you've
seen this morning, have claimed to have seen ads one or more
times per week.
I want to backtrack 1 second and say that our survey, which
we did as a modified PRIDE survey. We administered it to
students in grades 7 through 12 in greater Cincinnati. Our base
sizes were 47,000 in the year 2000 and 68,000 in the year 2002.
This is important, because those figures indicate that the
survey was conducted by over half of all students in the 10
county area surrounding greater Cincinnati. Also, within the
schools that participated, we had over 85 percent of students
in each individual school. So as Rob said, our results are
virtually a census as opposed to a sample.
The results that are key that I wish to highlight today are
shown in table three. What we did is look at those students who
had seen anti-drug ads one or more times per week and
contrasted those with the usage of students who had seen those
ads less frequently. What you'll see on the bottom line was
that those students who saw the ads more frequently had a 20
percent reduction in marijuana usage. We saw similar reductions
in other drugs also, you should be aware of.
If you notice, however, that for parents setting rules, the
reduction was much higher. I highlight this because it
demonstrates the face validity of our results. We're not saying
that the anti-drug ads will replace the effective parents and
their role in the family. What we're saying, however, is that
they are very meaningful results and statistically significant.
My recommendation is to very strongly continue the
advertising campaign which you have started. You should be very
sensitive to over-saturation. I have heard some discussion that
there might be interest in targeting more senior students,
grades 10, 11 and 12. I would highly recommend against this,
because we know from our data that they also perceive the ads
to be, they get more cynical as they get older, basically. They
perceive them to be less effective.
We've tracked the same schools year to year, we've seen
that if you start them out low, the rate of adoption of
marijuana and other drugs continues on a lower level. So I
think if I were putting my money in the campaign, I would do it
for younger students, not older.
My second recommendation is very strongly to test every ad
before you put it on air. We do this at Procter and Gamble.
Every major manufacturer does this. There's no reason you
shouldn't do the same thing. Very importantly, you should make
sure that the comments you're getting from students as they
view these ads include both rational and, as other speakers
have said, emotional components of what they feel about it. You
buy Tide and Pantene and Dawn detergent not only because they
work well, which they do, but also because there's an emotional
bond with those products which we develop through our copy.
The thing you wish to avoid, the thing you have to avoid,
is a situation where they hear the message that they think the
commercial is stupid or they don't believe it. By all means,
measure both components. Every major manufacturer of consumer
goods measures copy on both of these. Please do the same thing.
That's all the comments I have. If there are any questions,
I'd be glad to answer them.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Zimmerman follows:]
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Mr. Souder. Thank you very much. I would yield to Mr. Barr
if he has any opening statement or questions.
Mr. Barr. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate
the chairman yielding and I appreciate this hearing today. I
apologize, we have a mandatory whip meeting that I have to go
to in a few minutes. But this hearing, this topic is very, very
important and I appreciate the testimony, including some of the
specific points, for example, that you just made, Mr.
Zimmerman.
I'm going from somebody who is very, very supportive of an
anti-drug campaign to somebody that's very skeptical of it.
Maybe it's just the way we're doing it, maybe it's the fact
that we're continuing to provide money to a company under
criminal investigation, and which has already defrauded the
Government out of millions of dollars. I'm talking about Ogilvy
and Mather.
It seems to me rather contradictory and sending a strange
message that we're using taxpayer dollars to fund an anti-drug
message and we're giving money to a company under criminal
investigation. I know that's not the topic of the hearing
today, but that, to be honest, is coloring very significantly
my view of this whole program and kind of illustrates part of
the problem with it.
I don't think we have a handle on it at the Federal
Government level in terms of how to do this in a method with
integrity and that's based on good science and so forth. So I'm
going to look very, very carefully at reauthorizing this
program.
The one concern about everything else in terms of the
substance, though, aside from this problem with Ogilvy and
Mather that I think is very, very serious, is the problem with
so-called medicinal marijuana. The NORML group, the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which is sort of
one of the points of the spear for the pro-drug movement,
they've become much more sophisticated, much smarter than they
used to be, unfortunately. They realize now, I think, and have
come to realize over the last several year that the way to get
their foot in the door is not through directly advocating the
legalization of mind-altering drugs, but to do it under the
guise of the benign approach of medicinal marijuana.
And to be honest with you, I think they're having some
considerable degree of success in this area by portraying
marijuana as a medicine to help sick people, particularly those
who are very sick, cancer patients, for example, those in pain,
preying on the natural tendency of all people, young or old, to
reach out and try and help somebody who is in pain or who is
suffering from a very debilitating, indeed, life threatening
illness. I don't think that we've done a good job of countering
that, even recognizing the insidious nature of what these drug
legalizers are doing under the guise of so-called medicinal
marijuana.
Should we confront this directly through the ad campaign?
In other words, tell particularly young people that marijuana
is not a medicine, it is not something benign. Because I think
the message of the drug legalizers who have realized that the
way to get their foot in the door is to use this so-called
medicinal marijuana approach is working. I worry about that a
great deal, and we don't seem to be confronting it directly. I
think we need to. Otherwise, we're going to lose this battle.
We've already lost it at some level in a couple of the States.
Do you all have any thoughts on that? I guess the question
is, should we address this specifically and try and counter it?
Do you all see this as a serious threat to continuing the
effort against mind-altering drugs, what the legalizers are
doing through the so-called medicinal marijuana approach?
Mr. Zimmerman. If I was trying to answer your question, I
would first talk with a number of students, grades 7 through
12, and find out from them the most convincing arguments and
counter-arguments. I would have to shift my frame of reference
from the legalization to the kids and say, what's effective for
them.
And if, indeed, talking and convincing them that the
medicinal use, convincing them that it's not just an actual
good drug, is effective, then I would go after that full
barrel. But I'd have to talk to some students first, to be
quite honest.
Mr. Barr. I hear this from students, when we have student
groups up here and student groups in the district, not in large
numbers, mind you. I mean, it's not like all of the students
are in favor of this. But I'm hearing it with increasing
frequency among some student groups, and that worries me, that
the message is getting out to them that marijuana is simply a
drug, it's a medicine, it helps people as opposed to destroying
minds.
Ms. Patrick. We actually did a summit with Connecticut
youth that they held and ran on this topic. I also took young
people out to testify to our own legislature when one of these
bills was being considered.
I agree that message is getting through to young people. I
think it speaks even more to the need for this campaign and to
have that counter-balancing influence, because it's through
mass media and it's through the Internet that young people are
acquiring this perception that marijuana, and the other drug
this is happening with is ecstacy, are harmless drugs. Without
that counterbalancing force, we in the prevention field simply
do not reach enough of these kids.
Our State right now is in the process of cutting budgets
and prevention has been deemed the lowest priority, therefore,
the first thing to be cut. So I am very, very concerned that if
this campaign ends, we will see that same cycle that we've seen
over and over again, where funding declines, use goes up, we
have a crisis and then we pour a lot more money into it again.
Like I said, I've been at this for 25 years, I've seen a number
of those cycles.
But I agree with you that message is getting through to
young people. And I think counterbalancing that is very
important.
Mr. Barr. Specifically addressing the medicinal marijuana
issue?
Ms. Patrick. Specifically the medicinal marijuana. We had
gotten that signal, too, which is why we did this summit,
because we wanted to ask kids. Then we asked them for their
recommendations on what they thought should be done to
counterbalance it. They did include the anti-drug advertising
as part of the recommendations. They also focused very heavily
on the importance of parents talking to them about this stuff.
But yes, in Connecticut, that is definitely influencing
kids.
Mr. Barr. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for
letting me go out of order. I appreciate the ranking member's
indulgence also.
Mr. Souder. Thank you. Mr. Gilman, do you have an opening
statement?
Mr. Gilman. Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman. And I want to thank
you for conducting this hearing. I'll be brief.
I think the media campaign is an essential part of our drug
war. The problem has been how effective has it been. I note
that the Congress appropriated some $35 million to study, make
an evaluation of the media campaign, specifically the phase
three multimedia efforts, which have been underway since 1999.
In that study, the results of which I guess will not be
published until the year 2004, we were hoping it could be
earlier, is charged to examine the effectiveness of the
campaign at preventing kids from using drugs as well as its
effect on getting parents to talk to their children.
I regret I was delayed in coming over and didn't hear some
of the initial evaluations of our present campaign. But I'd
like to direct a question to Mr. Portman, who's doing an
outstanding job in his work. Mr. Portman, several advertising
professionals have noted that the media campaign is spending up
to one-third of their annual budget on things other than direct
media buys. Should Congress legislate that a minimum percentage
of the budget be spent on direct media buys, and what
percentage would you recommend?
Mr. Portman. You put me on the spot, my friend.
Mr. Gilman. I'm sorry to do that.
Mr. Portman. First of all, thank you very, very much for
not just coming today and your focus on the media campaign, but
for all you've done on this issue. When I first got here 9
years ago and joined the task force, you were the co-chair, and
you were one of the few people around here who was focused on
this issue.
Mr. Gilman. Thank you.
Mr. Portman. You have now spawned some acolytes here on
this subcommittee. Thank you for the work on the supply side
and the demand side. One of your proteges has just arrived here
on the drug front.
Mr. Gilman. Not a protege, he's a good fellow battler.
Mr. Portman. I think you raise a very, very valid concern.
We heard from the professionals here about the necessity to
have a certain level of advertising out there. When we started
this campaign, you recall we basically had three principles.
One was this notion of continuing to get pro bono help from
the creative side, so the taxpayer wasn't picking up the
creative side, and because frankly, we didn't think the
Government could do it as well as the people itself. So people
that are out there every day trying to determine what the
consumers actually want and need seemed to us to be probably
better equipped that somebody in the bureaucracy in Washington.
And Paul just talked about that, his training in that and how
he's brought that training to bear on what we do in Cincinnati.
Second is, we wanted to get a match for it. So it was $1 of
Federal money would be matched by the private sector. We were
leveraging private sector resources to try to keep this
campaign going. Because as you know, at that time, the campaign
had fallen off, partly because of the competition in the media
market.
But the third thing was, hard-hitting ads that would be on
public media. To us that was primarily TV. And also it included
radio and print. But we wanted to be sure we had enough in the
budget to do this in a way that met a certain level, just like
you do in a political campaign, so people could actually have
their attitudes change, which would then change behavior.
And I do have a concern that as you begin to pull money
away from that and pull it toward other things, which may be
very well meaning and even effective in some cases, like
advertising at a grocery store or advertising a sporting event
or even some of the Internet work which is very important, but
then you're pulling it away from what our focus was. And our
focus was to be sure you have these ads out there, hard-hitting
ads, countering what Bob Barr just talked about a moment ago. I
think we have gotten away from that. And I think we need to get
more focused on kind of the bare bones, what we started with
and what the original principles were.
So I don't know what the magic number is. I don't know
whether 30 percent, which I think you indicated is the amount
that's taken away now, I think that's too much to take away
from the campaign in terms of hard-hitting ads in public media.
I don't know if there should be a 10 percent number or 15
percent. I don't know what that number is. That's why I say you
put me on the spot. That's really for this subcommittee to
grapple with, and I want to work with you on that.
But I do think we need, unfortunately, because we're all
for flexibility here, but we need to put in at least some
guidelines now that we didn't have before. That was certainly
our intent, it's in the legislative history. But ONDCP did take
that and expand it, the so-called non-media uses to a point
where I think they've gone too far.
Mr. Gilman. Thank you very much, Rob. Is there any----
Mr. Zimmerman. Can I make a statement, please? You asked
about 30 percent. I have some information which would be
relevant to that.
Mr. Gilman. Yes.
Mr. Zimmerman. Whenever we launch new business products
into the marketplace, you typically weight your advertising
spending so that it gears toward television, typically. You
might spend 90 percent of your funding on television, 10
percent, as an example, on magazines or other media.
The important thing to realize is that this does vary by
category. If people are looking for information on a new drug,
such as Prilosec or something like that, they typically would
look not necessary for mass media, but they would look for
print or alternative sources of media. So depending upon your
goal as a subcommittee, if you're looking to get the message
out to a group of people who will be convinced more by print
than they would be by television, then you should skew your
spending toward print.
So again, focus on your end user and where they look for
information to help them make up their mind. Is it the pulpit,
is it the magazine or is it TV?
Mr. Gilman. Is that one-third of the expenditure on other
than direct media buys, is that an appropriate figure?
Mr. Zimmerman. I don't know unless I knew what that 30
percent was for. I would need to know more detail.
Mr. Palmgreen. I think I can add something of an insider's
view on this. Up until last summer, I was a member of the
scientific panel advising the ONDCP campaign. I say advising,
that doesn't mean we were always listened to. But we were
listened to very frequently.
And one of the goals of the campaign has always been to
have a non-media component. Absolutely the major component of
the campaign has been a media component, and television has
been the primary portion of that component.
But there has always been a non-media component that
involved things like the Internet, partnering with various
local anti-drug coalitions. The idea here is that as Paul said,
there are many ways to reach the audience that we need to
reach. Coupled with this has been a very large increase in the
cost of purchasing advertising in the national media over the
last 4 to 5 years.
I've heard as high as 50 percent during some time periods.
That means that for the same amount of money that the campaign
is getting a lot less air time than they did when they first
started. Yet they started out with $195 million a year funding,
and that has dropped to $180 million a year. We're not keeping
pace. The campaign is not keeping pace with inflation.
Mr. Gilman. Is that 50 percent figure--just one followup--
--
Mr. Souder. Mr. Gilman, we skipped over our turn in
questioning. We really need to----
Mr. Gilman. Just one question. What is the 50 percent
you're referring to? Is that the cost of purchasing?
Mr. Palmgreen. The cost of purchasing national television
time during certain time periods like prime time.
Mr. Gilman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Souder. Thank you. Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. I want to go back to, I think it was you, Mr.
Palmgreen, that talked about the most effective ads being ones
that show some kind of risk, right? Is that you?
Mr. Palmgreen. That is the types of ads that we have
studied in our research. Actually, it follows right along with
Dr. Johnston's research at the University of Michigan, in his
Monitoring the Future study, where he has found over this
period from 1975, I believe, that use of drugs and the
perceived risks of drugs have tracked each other almost in a
mirror image. As perceived risk of drugs went up, drug use has
gone down.
Mr. Cummings. OK. Let me get to the way I want to take you.
One of the things that was very interesting, the previous drug
czar came to my district and talked to some young people about
the ads. These were high school students. It was interesting to
note that one of, and they ran about maybe 10 or 15 of the
typical ads. One of the ads that they ranked No. 1 was one by a
woman named Lauryn Hill. She's a singer. She didn't talk a lot
about risk, she just talked about it's not good for you, that
kind of thing.
But I think they were more impressed with the fact that she
was somebody who had a similar experience of life as they were
experiencing, at least this is what they said. And it wasn't so
much risk, but the personality. I've noticed these ads, some of
the ads have personalities, I think one of them has some
skateboard guy and different people.
I was just wondering, to all of you, have you found there
to be, if you combine the two, that is a personality talking
about risk, is that more effective? Is it basically
personality? Or is it risk? In other words, which ones are most
effective?
Mr. Palmgreen. Well, our research with high sensation
seekers, we have spent a lot of time talking to high sensation
seeking youth about what really does influence them. One of the
things, we're talking about from youth all the way through to
young adults, and they consistently told us over the years that
they are not really influenced by celebrities. They want to see
people in messages that look like themselves, that can speak to
themselves.
Now, the Lauryn Hill ad that you're referring to, I think
one of the reasons that it was effective was because she did
mention in that ad some of the really negative things, very
briefly, she mentioned some of the very negative things that
using drugs did to her. Then she moved on to some of the more
positive consequences of the lifestyle that was drug-free,
which is a very effective way to counter-argue the idea of
using drugs.
Mr. Cummings. Mr. Zimmerman, you talked about over-
saturation. I'll get back to you, Mr. Johnston, but over-
saturation, when they got to be older, I guess you were talking
about seniors in high school. So the question becomes, do you
put your money, if you really want to affect high school
students, do you put your money in when they're younger, and
does that hold? In other words, if we were to reduce our aiming
at the high school students, does the research show that if you
do an effective job when they're younger, that it will hold
when they become seniors? Are you following me?
Mr. Zimmerman. Yes.
Mr. Cummings. OK.
Mr. Zimmerman. I'll know for sure in another 2 years. But
we do our survey every 2 years. So I only have those two cells
of information.
What we've seen is, whereas our normal curve of usage,
monthly usage, starts out low in grades 7 and 8, then it ramps
up like a stairstep through grade 12. What we saw was last
year's seventh graders are now this survey's ninth graders.
They're definitely on a different slope, the rate of adoption
is much lower. We're hoping this continues. But as the other
speakers have said, this is totally dependent upon their
attitudes toward the usage of drugs. So you have to have a
message that they can relate to, as you said with the Lauryn
Hill copy, and you have to have a message that makes sense to
them.
So we feel that there is evidence to suggest that, if you
target the younger people, it will stay there, as long as their
attitudes hold constant.
Mr. Cummings. Dr. Johnston, did you have something?
Mr. Johnston. I would agree with that. As we've looked over
the years at where changes first occurred, it's almost always
the youngest students that either startup or start down. And
our interpretation of that is that they are the most, in a
sense, the most blank slates. So there's a new story to be
written on that slate. And the influences that society presents
to them are quicker to show up in behavior. We've also seen
that as they get older, as you're saying, they tend to carry
those behaviors with them.
Actually, tobacco is the most powerful of all the so-called
cohort effects. If a generation of kids starts smoking even at
age 11 or 12, that generation is going to be heavier smokers
throughout the life cycle. It tends to stay with them. There's
less of a cohort effect with the other drugs, because they're
easier to stop, ironically.
But nevertheless, we have seen a cohort effect working
during the 1990's. So what we see among the eighth graders then
keeps getting shifted up in the age spectrum.
My guess from seeing that is that we're best to focus on
the youngest kids. You don't forget about the older ones, but
you put the majority of your resources and targeting on the
younger ones, which I think received regional partnership
campaign strategy. I also think it's important to get
sufficient weight out there. We've been talking about how
inflation has sort of reduced the actual number of messages
received. And as you saw, even with the payment these days, we
still haven't gotten up to the media weight that the kids were
reporting in the early 1990's, when we were quite successful,
actually.
So I think I would certainly argue against reducing
resources. I would argue more for increasing them. Probably
focusing on more. I think they've been diced up too many ways.
There's a lot of good objectives. But you can't pursue them
all. If you say, where am I going to get the most bang for the
buck, I think it's by focusing.
One other thing I might mention, two I guess, one is that I
think the ONDCP probably made a strategic error in always
putting their byline at the end of their ads. Because I think,
as your Lauryn Hill example showed, the effect of a message
depends on who the messenger is. I don't think a Federal office
is the messenger that most teenagers are very responsive to. So
putting that at the end of every ad I think just causes them to
reach for the mental flush valve and drop that message that
they just temporarily stored. I think we ought to get out of
that. If there has to be some sort of a label that says this is
Government funded, come up with a new label that's not so
offensive to kids.
But the other point I wanted to make is, I said that a lot
of the change we've seen is drug specific. I think that will
continue to be the case. If you see marijuana as more
dangerous, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to use
cocaine less. So it's one's beliefs about all the individual
drugs that matter. Right now we're dealing with a burgeoning
ecstacy problem in the country. We're finally beginning to see
a turnaround in perceived risk on ecstacy, and I think it's
quite possible next year we'll see a turnaround in use.
But that's a good example of where there needs to be
focused campaigns and conceivably for a year or two, that would
be the majority of the campaign on a specific drug that is a
threat at that point and about which people know relatively
little in terms of the consequences.
Mr. Souder. Dr. Palmgreen, your study shows the opposite of
what those two gentlemen just said, that in the Lexington
results it worked in the first period and in 6 months, it was
rising almost back to the level where it was. And if you hadn't
run a second campaign on the older kids, it wouldn't have
dropped back down, according to your data. How do you reconcile
that?
Mr. Palmgreen. I think that's correct. I think our research
does indicate that you can reach these older teens with the
right kinds of messages. The kids, when we ran that Lexington
campaign and that Knoxville campaign in 1998 were the 9th
through 12th grades. So we're talking about the average grade
being about the 10th grade, something like that. And it worked
in both cities.
So I think they can be reached with the right kinds of
messages that feature the kids their age to talk about the
kinds of problems that kids their age face. I think prevention
is something that's almost a lifelong problem. There are always
new drugs surfacing that people will adopt. We all know, for
example, that college students, when they become college
students, that alcohol use often increases quite a bit, and
binge drinking tends to go up quite a bit. This is why we have
so many efforts on college campuses to try to stop binge
drinking.
I think what Director Walters has proposed, to focus on 14
to 16 year olds, I know this runs somewhat counter to what Paul
was suggesting, but I guess I'm going according to the data
that we have, and also thinking of it in these terms. These
will be the same kids who are going to be 14 to 16 this coming
year who were hit with ads earlier when they were younger, when
they were 11 to 13 years old. They will be getting a double
dose, they will be getting the message reinforced. That's very
important in prevention, and it's something that doesn't happen
very often in prevention.
Mr. Souder. I'll come back to some more questions. I was
going to yield to Mr. Mica next.
Mr. Mica. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate your
calling this hearing. I'm dismayed at the lack of progress
we've made in this whole media campaign effort, anti-drug
effort.
When I chaired the subcommittee, we instituted the program
as a compromise between those of us who wanted the private
sector to take a larger role and the media, which has basically
free access to our air waves, to increase their public
participation and public interest contributions to the
community and our society by donating more time. The program
has been a disaster. I'm dismayed at both, I was dismayed at
its beginning activities.
We heard testimony on the subcommittee of how it was sort
of put together on a half-baked basis. And finally it was then
turned over to a horde of consultants, some of whom ripped off
the program. Some I'm hoping that we're still pursuing criminal
charges on, and I think some have already paid fines for their
participation.
I'm dismayed that what's happened is actually continuing a
decline of the media participation in some of the programs. I'm
pleased that the new director has called a time out to look at
where we are in this. We need to get back to the public sector,
providing some guidance and more participation from the private
sector, which has been so successful. Certainly the Partnership
has done an excellent job in the past and I think can continue
in the future.
But we do need to sort this out. The Kentucky study is
interesting, but the Kentucky study, I don't have a clue as to
how it relates to the ads that we now have. I think it's sort
of comparing apples and oranges. It does show that public
service announcements I guess were successful. As I look at the
study in this limited case, and in bringing down some use of
marijuana, that's primarily what was studied?
Mr. Palmgreen. Yes, that's right, Congressman.
Mr. Mica. Was there any study or are there any statistics
about increased other drug use during that period? We didn't
have as much of an ecstacy problem from May 1996 to 1998 as
we've had from May 1998 to current time.
Mr. Palmgreen. One of the things we looked at, we didn't
look at ecstacy at that time, because it was not a major
problem at that time. But we looked at alcohol, cigarettes,
cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD, a whole range of drugs.
Mr. Mica. I don't see any statistics.
Mr. Palmgreen. Not this----
Mr. Mica. Is there any evaluation of what took place with
those other substances?
Mr. Palmgreen. That's in a much longer report that was
published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Mr. Mica. Were there increases, decreases?
Mr. Palmgreen. What we found, we put those in there for one
major purpose, we expected, we were targeting marijuana only.
We expected to see effects of the campaign on marijuana.
Therefore, we did not expect to see effects on any of these
other substances. So we also ran profiles on all of these other
substances. And sure enough, we found no effects on these other
substances.
As Dr. Johnston says, the beliefs about these drugs are
specific to the particular drug. So we affected what we were
aiming at, marijuana. The other drugs did not show those
effects.
Mr. Mica. Again, we have just seen a transfer, maybe some
decreases in some areas, increases in others, and I'm concerned
about the ongoing NIDA evaluation, $35 million. We won't have
results until 2004.
In the private sector, I think if you waited to see the
results for that long, you'd not only be out of business and
have declared bankruptcy, but you would definitely be defunct.
I guess the Cincinnati experience would be the only thing that
might be comparable. I notice, and you have had some good
success there. Is there an evaluation as to transfer from other
drugs, from marijuana in Cincinnati?
Mr. Zimmerman. There is no transfer, absolutely,
unequivocally.
Mr. Mica. So your evaluation shows across the board
reductions or at least some stabilization?
Mr. Zimmerman. Yes, sir.
Mr. Mica. OK. What was the cost of this effort? And I don't
want you to give me a figure of private contributions.
Actually, if you could separate them out, public money that was
in the program, and over what period of time, and then maybe
some guesstimate of what the private contributions were.
Mr. Zimmerman. I don't have to guesstimate. We had
approximately $1 million worth of advertising media donated per
year in the greater Cincinnati area, which includes
southwestern Ohio and northern Kentucky.
Mr. Mica. How much public money was in it?
Mr. Zimmerman. The only public money was the national
campaign.
Mr. Mica. And how much?
Mr. Zimmerman. I don't know the dollar value of that in
Cincinnati.
Mr. Mica. See, I think that's very important. I'd like to
see what was put in there. I mean, if there was not that much,
maybe we should abandon the whole project and just let the
locals do a good job like you did.
Mr. Zimmerman. Judgmentally, the majority of the effort was
the national program.
Mr. Mica. Can anybody tell us, was it half a million, a
million over a year or 2 years?
Mr. Souder. The problem is that they reduced the local ads,
but they were running national ads which of course were carried
in the local market.
Mr. Mica. But we can, I mean, this isn't rocket science,
even if you're running a campaign for Congress, you can tell
what your opponent has placed as far as ads. We can certainly
find out how much was spent in this area.
But I cannot believe a $1 billion program we can't point to
once place, see how much it cost, how effective it was across
the board, what the private contributions were. And then if it
was successful, as Cincinnati is, why we can't duplicate that
in other areas. It's just absolutely mind boggling. We spend
more damned money studying, and this NIDA thing, I would like
to cancel that right now, $35 million in the evaluation that
won't be done until the spring of 2004. Only in Government
could we throw money around in such a waste, and we've got kids
dying on the street and we can't duplicate a successful
program.
Mr. Zimmerman. Mr. Mica, what I will do is, in greater
Cincinnati, is I will go back to our media subcommittee for our
coalition. We have a very good working relationship with the
various TV channels in Cincinnati. We'll see if we can back
that number out. The problem is, sir----
Mr. Mica. I think it would be very good to look at, and
again, Rob Portman and some of the others from Ohio have done
such a great job in an area that during the time we've had this
campaign, so we could see what nationally has been done, get a
handle on those figures and replicate that to other communities
that are willing to come forward and support that.
Mr. Zimmerman. The difficulty in doing that, sir, is that
some of the national programs, the commercials are fed in by
satellite and the local TV stations don't have control over
them.
Mr. Mica. Well, certainly we can get their records, if
necessary, we could subpoena those records.
Mr. Zimmerman. It's difficult to back out, having done this
for tracking our current businesses at Procter and Gamble, it's
very difficult to do. I'll see if I can do it and I'll get back
to you.
Mr. Mica. I think that's important. I think we should ask
that from Mr. Walters' office. Because we need to get this back
together, we need to make it work, best utilization of limited
Federal dollars. These aren't limited amounts, they're
significant amounts. And then where we can have some good
results, such as this community has exhibited, use that as a
model. I don't have any further questions, thank you.
Mr. Souder. What I would like to do for this hearing report
in the number of days we have is to ask--since there's no point
in trying to back this through to Cincinnati, I think what we
should do is go to Ogilvy and Mather and see where their time
period buys were that would have been national buys and local
buys. They have to report that to the Federal Government. It
will be in Federal Government records.
Mr. Zimmerman. But the issue is whether or not they break
it down by our region or not. They may not break it down by our
MMA, and if they don't, that's the problem. That's when it get
difficult.
Mr. Souder. OK. But for example, if the ad ran on 60
Minutes, unless it was preempted in your region, that should
count as a national buy that hit your region. So we'll have the
national buy during the period of time of your study, we'll
have if they bought any regional buy during the period of time
of your study and then your own buy. And to combine those
three, they have to report by law. That was one of the disputes
that we were having in the bookkeeping.
Mr. Mica. Mr. Chairman, would you yield a second? To me,
again, this isn't rocket science. We're all running, will be
running campaigns or people run campaigns. You do target areas.
I cannot believe that ONDCP cannot run in, say 10 communities,
take Baltimore, I mean, and run a concentrated campaign and
evaluate it. There are firms out there that will tell you the
effectiveness of your message over a certain period of time in
the program. The gentleman here has given us an evaluation of
what good and bad ads are, I mean, even putting the tag line on
that he's telling us, free, that you have to sort out who the
messenger is to make these ads most effective.
But if we can't take a few areas in the country, run a
program, and evaluate its effectiveness, and this hasn't been
going on just today, we're 3 years into the program.
Mr. Souder. We need our committee records before we do any
earmarking inside the bill, we need to know the interactive
variables in Cincinnati and Lexington and Knoxville. In other
words, your campaigns were not running alone. Because there
would have been Federal ads running, if there were local
placements, and we can get those things by regional markets. If
it's true, then part of what I would be thinking is that some
of this 33 percent that got away from the media buy might be
used for the local market supplement. In fact, there could be
bonuses if the communities come up with dollars to match.
Do they offer you the ads that you can raise money to run
the national ads if you chose in your market?
Ms. Patrick. We've actually just started in Connecticut
working with our media to have sponsored ads. Because again, I
think sustaining the pro bono support is very difficult. I have
to say too that I'm very concerned that the national publicity
discrediting the campaign is going to affect media's
willingness to continue to run it on a pro bono basis.
So where we may have been successful in the past, and
certainly I think when we, during out pilot phase in
Connecticut and during the period that there was a local buy
going on, our media were going way beyond a one to one match.
They were excited, they were invested. Some of them have
sustained that, others have dropped off.
I think we need to also look at the unintended consequences
here that the discrediting of the campaign is having in terms
of media's willingness to participate, period.
Mr. Souder. Have any of you used any of the national ads to
have local people put them up in your markets?
Ms. Patrick. Yes.
Mr. Souder. You have. So they make that available, actually
nationally, you don't have to produce.
Dr. Johnston and all of you who have dealt with market
research, it would intuitively tell me that the medicinal
marijuana campaigns have had a cross impact on our message,
when you're trying to run ads that it's harmful, particularly
if it's high risk oriented, and medicinal marijuana ads are
running simultaneously. To my knowledge, we don't have any
data. But would you just kind of initially comment, because at
the very least, what we would probably have in the study mix of
the tracking is whether or not, although it wouldn't be a
significant sample size, that California, Arizona and States
where referendums were running may have skewed even this survey
that suggest that the recent ads weren't working on marijuana.
In other words, it may be that they were working in
Lexington and Knoxville, in Cincinnati, in other parts of the
country, and what we may be getting is a byproduct of medicinal
marijuana referendums in certain States where it's changed the
nature of that in market research. It happens all the time.
None of us know the answer to that question.
But wouldn't you, if you were trying to basically sell
Crest toothpaste, try to figure that out, if there was a
variable, or wouldn't you look for, and then if it looked like
it was there, then you'd try to get it to a statistical sample
size?
Mr. Johnston. Maybe I could address that. I think it's a
good point that what else is going on in society is going to be
influencing the very things we're trying to influence with the
ad campaigns and maybe upsetting them or hiding, masking the
effect of them. Certainly if you look at marijuana, that's one
of the things that's been going on in the last few years is a
very vigorous public discussion about medical marijuana use and
the initiatives to bring it about in various States.
We have done some analysis in California of the attitudes
of kids before and after the initiative that was passed,
thinking that while it may or may not influence their actual
marijuana use, it may influence their attitudes about
marijuana. So far, and this is not yet published, but so far we
have not found any evidence of effects there. But that's
because we're comparing them to the rest of the Nation.
The fact is, I think if there is an effect, it probably is
nationwide, because it was in the national media. So it could
be that there is an effect, but we can't parse it out, because
it's affecting everybody.
Mr. Souder. What age group were you studying on that? It
could also be they were too young.
Mr. Johnston. I'm sorry?
Mr. Souder. What age group were you studying? They may not
have seen the campaign. On California, when you said that you
did the study in California, you were tracking medicinal
marijuana, were you tracking junior high students who would
have been not kind of in the market at that time, or were you
tracking high school or adults?
Mr. Johnston. Both junior and senior high school students.
Mr. Souder. So theoretically, you should have seen some
response.
I also need to clarify for the record, because Mr.
Zimmerman raised his hand, but that isn't in the record that in
fact Cincinnati used the national ads.
Now, I want to come back to another question, which was,
several times you said there didn't seem to be, in fact you
said it stronger than that, any gain in other illegal drugs
when you convinced the target market on that drug. Mr.
Zimmerman I believe said that, I believe Dr. Johnston said
that, Professor Palmgreen. There seemed to be that kind of
general consensus. If that's true, whenever we run a campaign
are we merely shifting them to another drug?
Mr. Palmgreen. That was one of our fears, and that's
another reason why we've measured all of these other
substances. We really did not see any increases in those other
drugs. We were afraid perhaps we might push them from marijuana
to using something else. We didn't see any increases in other
drugs.
Mr. Souder. There was no reduction, but there was no
increase?
Mr. Palmgreen. There was no increase, right.
Mr. Souder. OK. And you saw the same?
Mr. Zimmerman. Yes, sir.
Mr. Souder. Good. That's good to clarify. So you didn't
lose ground by shifting, you just didn't gain the ground that
you had hoped.
I wanted to ask some questions on the specific targeting in
Lexington and Knoxville. My probably biggest single complaint
about what we've been doing in the narcotics area is that we
don't target to high risk. In fact, we in the community anti-
drug initiative put a percentage that went to higher drug use
areas in the allocation of funds.
But you've come up with a different concept here, and I
have some first technical questions, Dr. Palmgreen. Are these
eight questions all the questions that you do in the profile?
Mr. Palmgreen. The original questionnaire that was
developed back in the 1960's had something like 80 items. And
you can't administer that to kids. They go to sleep.
So we had to shorten it as much as we could and still have
a valid instrument. So we cut it down to eight items. That's
the only thing that we used to measure sensation seeking, and
it correlates very strongly with the longer version.
Mr. Souder. Do they have to say yes to all eight?
Mr. Palmgreen. Oh, no, it's a five point scale, they can
strongly agree to strongly disagree on each one.
Mr. Souder. And in this, when you looked at these
variables, you don't have, for example, income, performance in
school, you went more to psychological variables?
Mr. Palmgreen. We measured all those things, we looked at a
whole range of what we call risk and protective factors, risk
factors being things like delinquency, having friends that use
marijuana, protective factors being things like being highly
engaged in religion and so forth. We took those things into
account, controlled for them statistically in our analyses. So
they have been built into the analysis.
Another thing, too, I'd like to make a point, is that
Lexington and Knoxville were very similar. No ONDCP campaign
was running at that time nationally, except for the last 6
months of data gathering. The pro bono effort by the
Partnership had really dropped off tremendously. But it was the
same effort in both the Lexington and Knoxville markets. We
also checked with the schools to make sure that they were
running the same kinds of anti-drug programs. We are still in
touch with them about that, and they still are running exactly
the same kinds of anti-drug programs.
We monitored the daily newspapers in each community,
looking for things that might be going on, changes in laws and
so forth that might have changed marijuana use in one community
but not the other. No such things happened. So it was a very
well controlled study that you can do on the community level,
you can compare one community against another.
The problem with the ONDCP campaign is that there is no
comparison group. The comparison group would have to be a
country identical to the United States, basically, that did not
have an ONDCP campaign. Obviously, that's impossible to do.
Failing that, if you really want to make strong statements
about the effects of the campaign, what most social scientists
will agree is that you need data about drug use well before the
campaign started, during the campaign and after the campaign.
One of the things that's always puzzled me is that no money was
appropriated, perhaps it was never asked for, was appropriated
for NIDA or anybody else to gather data prior to when the
campaign started to find out what the trends were in use prior
to when the campaign started, as we did in Lexington and
Knoxville, so you could see what happened when the campaign
started.
Unfortunately, the NIDA study that Congressman Mica has
referred to didn't really start gathering data until----
Mr. Souder. I don't think that's fair. Don't you believe
that at the national level we track this stuff through multiple
different studies that could be correlated? In other words,
you're right, it wasn't precisely correlated, there's no
control group, I agree with those premises. But it wasn't that
we don't have the Michigan studies, other studies that we do
through schools that kind of show trends in drug use that
public agencies do?
Mr. Palmgreen. Right, they show trends in drug use. There's
no question about that. They are not geared as specifically,
though, as the NIDA investigation to measure exposure to
particular PSAs in the campaign, relate that exposure to
changes in attitudes and beliefs and so forth. The NIDA study
unfortunately didn't get started gathering data until 1\1/2\
years after the campaign went national; 1\1/2\ years after the
campaign went national.
And then we only have 18 months of data since then. We have
a snapshot, is what we have. And this is what all the
hullabaloo is about. We're making a lot about something that we
shouldn't be making a lot about, that at this point, that study
was really not able to make the kinds of statements about the
campaign impact that people wanted it to be able to make.
Mr. Souder. Right. You wouldn't do it this way if you were
in private business, you'd go broke. In fact, I just had a
conversation with Dr. Walters, that I believe this anti-
terrorist campaign is effective, it links up with the subject
at hand.
But I told him, I have a concern that in the ad research,
my background is more marketing and business, that the
measurement of this is that what we didn't know going on is
whether, if somebody who is a risk user of narcotics will
actually be swayed by the premise that he might be funding a
terrorist. What we may find is that 90 percent of the people,
we've convinced them that narcotics, which is what the goal of
the advertising agency is, that there's a link between
terrorism and narcotics. What we didn't do in our preliminary
study is show that had a resulting reduction in drug use,
because we didn't measure that.
So it would be, from an ad perspective, a successful
campaign. And as a building block, but it could come out with
another study that says, it didn't reduce drug use because it
was a building block in a longer process. And we're not used to
taking people's taxpayer money and, when we were trying to get
the maximum use up in some frequency on the TV not to do the
marketing research. We're paying some of the price for that,
we're hoping that would be cross-correlated.
I have a couple of other questions, but I'll yield to Mr.
Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
What is the most effective way, do you all think, to reach
young people? Just to reach them. In other words, is it in
print, through peers, parents, television? If you had to put
together a tool kit to reach young people the age we're talking
about here, what are the three things you would make sure you
do? I'm talking about the kinds of things I just talked about.
And is television probably the most effective?
Let me just take it a little bit further. Mr. Mica talks
about television. When I first ran for office, I was literally
two to one down. It was a very short campaign. And over in the
process of a weekend, I went to two to one up because of
television. In a weekend, I mean from Friday to Monday morning.
So I'm just wondering, first of all, I'm trying to focus in, I
take it that all of you believe we need a media campaign.
I'm just trying to figure out how significant is it. In
other words, if we took it out, this is a better way of asking
it, what will we substitute it with? Assuming you're trying to
reach young people.
Mr. Johnston. That's part of the problem. We don't have a
lot of arrows in this quiver. We've got prevention in the
schools, but there's not a lot of evidence that's what in most
of the schools is terribly effective. I think there are
programs that are effective, but they mostly aren't in the
schools.
We've got what parents do, but one of the major ways you
can influence that is through the media. So I think if we threw
this out, we'd give up a lot.
The media itself is important. News coverage, I think, is
important partly because it has credibility. So when a new drug
comes along and there start to be casualties, and those get
reported in the media, people believe that and it begins to
change their views. But I think we can accelerate that process
considerably by means of advertising and focused messages. I
think within the media, it seems to me that radio and
television are the most powerful for teenagers. If I had to
pick, it's clear from our data that their use of the Web is a
growing source of media consumption. Actually, they are
gradually reducing their consumption of radio and television.
But still it's very high.
So you ask a very broad and difficult question to answer.
But I think that if I had to place my own money where I wanted
to get the most impact, I think it would probably be in radio
and television, and to a lesser extent, the Web. I probably
would not try to do a lot of the other things that are here,
not because they aren't worth doing and worthy causes, but
because I think that if you spread your resources too finely
across too many objectives, you don't accomplish any of them.
Mr. Palmgreen. I would certainly agree with that. The media
are far and away the most cost effective way of doing the
prevention job. That doesn't mean that there aren't other ways
to approach it, there certainly are. School programs, school-
based programs are certainly very important and the Internet is
certainly becoming much more important. In fact, ONDCP in the
campaign has been making a very concerted effort on the
Internet. They've been making a very concerted effort to
partner with schools to try to get a multiplier effect for the
dollars that they're spending. But the media portion is the
portion that's by far the most effective. We would miss it
tremendously if it disappeared.
Mr. Cummings. Let me just throw one thing in here real
quick. When we talk about ad specific, let's say an ad specific
to ecstacy, and you all talked about how it didn't seem to make
things worse or better, I mean, as far as other drugs are
concerned. Is it better to have a, and I'll go back to the
Lauryn Hill ad, I don't think she talks about a specific drug.
Is it better to have sort of like a generic ad in instances, or
can they be just as effective, for example, as an ecstasy ad? I
mean, have you all looked into that kind of thing?
Mr. Johnston. I follow your point. I think that you
probably want a mix, obviously some ads can talk about drug use
as kind of a constellation of decisions that people make to
avoid or to engage in. But I guess I would argue that based on
what we know, it's important for a number of the ads to address
specific drugs, basically to pick out targets. So at any given
point in history, it seems to me, you look at what are the
problems that are facing kids who are growing and try to focus
some of the ads on those.
I mentioned the ad campaign on inhalants, which looked like
it was very successful. I think there was an earlier one on
heroin which had some evidence of success. Today clearly a
target is ecstasy. I guarantee you that within a year or two
there will be something else coming around. Because it keeps
coming around and we have to keep adding questions about new
drugs.
So I think to a certain degree, you need to tailor the
targets to what's there. And in a sense, you might be
allocating money for a target you don't even recognize yet, but
it's yet to be seen.
Mr. Palmgreen. Another point I'd like to make that is very
important, I think, is that it's age related. Our research that
we've done with kids of various age ranges, and a lot of other
research, has shown that young kids have a tendency to think of
drugs in general. They don't differentiate among drugs. They
don't know enough yet. So a generic anti-drug message can be
very effective with those younger kids.
As kids get older, they get smart. And they start to
differentiate among different types of drugs. The kids we
talked to said, look, don't try to tell us that marijuana is
going to kill us, because we know it's not going to. Tell us
what the effects of marijuana really are that we should be
worried about. And if you want to focus on some other drug like
meth or something, then give us something specific about meth.
Because we know the differences among those drugs.
So there, I think, as you get into the older kids, you have
to go to more targeted, more specific kinds of ads.
Mr. Cummings. I do believe that we are going to have an ad
campaign. But I also believe that we really have to clean this
up, so that we are spending these tax dollars efficiently and
effectively. Part of the reason why I say I think we're going
to have an ad campaign is based upon the things that you all
just said.
And if there were, if you had to give us advice, the one
thing that you would definitely do, or two things that you
would do, to make sure we're most effective and efficient in
the ad campaign, because that's what we're dealing with, when
all the dust settles, Barr can say what he wants to say, Mica
can say what he wants to say, I'm telling you, when it all
settles and boils down, there's going to be an ad campaign.
That's my guess. And you've got some ONDCP people sitting in
behind you.
What would you all say to Walters when you say, don't throw
out the baby with the bathwater, what would you say that you've
really got to do?
Mr. Palmgreen. Well, I think one of the things that needs
to be done is, as I said, our research said that I think very
dramatically and with a great deal of scientific rigor, showed
that campaigns that focus on the risks of drug use can be very
effective. And again, this ties in very closely with the
national data from Dr. Johnston's ongoing study.
One of the things, unfortunately, that the ONDCP campaign
has not done, and I'm not sure why that has occurred, is that
there have been very few risk ads produced, or what we call
negative consequence types of ads. Many of them have focused on
the positive consequences of a drug-free lifestyle, for
example. There hasn't been any research that I know of that has
really looked at those kinds of ads specifically to see whether
they are effective.
There have been a number of ads that have dealt with how to
resist efforts by your friends to get you to use drugs. Now
there is some research that indicates that programs like that
can work. We don't know whether ads like that can work. But
just this year, the ONDCP is now starting to focus on risk type
ads, negative consequence type ads, the terrorism ads would be
an example of that, but there are some other ads that they're
putting out.
I've seen the media plans for the rest of the year, they're
planning on running nothing but negative consequence or risk
ads for the rest of the year. What Director Walters has said is
they are going to be focusing more on those kinds of ads. I
think that's the right direction to be going.
Mr. Cummings. I'm almost finished, Mr. Chairman. But before
you answer, Dr. Johnston, it's interesting, the kids that I
talked about in my district, there were about 100 of them, high
school students, do you know what the No. 2 ad was after Lauryn
Hill? And these are all inner city, African American kids. It
was the frying pan. It says, the woman is throwing the frying
pan all around. Do you know the one I'm talking about?
Mr. Palmgreen. Yes.
Mr. Cummings. Is that considered a risk ad?
Mr. Palmgreen. Yes. I think that's considered a risk ad.
That was sort of the signature ad that kicked off the campaign.
And then we saw very few of those ads after that.
There was one in particular that you may have seen called
Vision Warrior that involved an African American who at one
time was an aspiring actor, became very much of a heavy drug
user, ruined his career, came out of that and decided to do
something about it. He started going around to schools and so
forth and produced a program. And he called it the Vision
Warrior, which is really an extremely effective approach.
The one PSA was made which in 30 seconds sort of shows a
microcosm of what he presents at the schools, at treatment
centers and so forth, an extremely effective ad. It has not
received very much air time, unfortunately. I think we need
more ads like that in the campaign.
Mr. Cummings. Dr. Johnston, what would you do? What would
you tell ONDCP, since they're listening?
Mr. Johnston. In some ways I hesitate, because persuasion
is a very, very difficult and subtle process. So if I come up
with simple solutions, they may not take into account the
subtleties. I think in general, I would argue for more media
weight, reaching kids with more messages, probably more of the
messages being drug specific, dealing with the drugs of
greatest concern at the moment or rising concern.
I would certainly do some research on whether or not to
take the ONDCP tag line off the back of all these ads, because
I think that may be a major discounting factor all by itself.
That would be the cheapest. In fact, it would cost nothing to
fix it.
And I think probably in the end, I would leave the
creatives to the advertising professionals who have spent their
careers doing this kind of thing. I think they can get guidance
about strategy. But I think at some point you have to turn them
over to the pros. I don't think we academics are very good at
it. I've tried at times, and I don't think probably Government
officials are probably good at it, either. But that doesn't
mean we shouldn't have judgments and shouldn't review what's
done.
Mr. Cummings. Ms. Patrick.
Ms. Patrick. I guess the thing I would urge you to do is to
keep the focus on parents. Because we saw such a significant
increase in parents' willingness to be educated on how to talk
to their kids when they would be motivated to have the talk.
Before that, we just didn't have much penetration with the
parent market at all in Connecticut.
So I think it motivated them, it scared them, quite
honestly. And then they wanted to know, well, what do I do, how
do I do it. And then they started coming to things.
Mr. Cummings. Mr. Zimmerman.
Mr. Zimmerman. I'm going to answer several of your
questions you raised earlier all at once. Specifically, when
people make decisions to try new products or to try marijuana
or whatever, they're doing it because they are not only aware
but they are persuaded to do that.
So if I were to tell the ONDCP one thing, I would tell them
that they absolutely must understand not only the ability of
their ads to generate awareness, but the ability of their ads
to persuade someone to not use, maintain non-usage or to stop
usage. You have to measure both. You also have to understand
the weight at which they go on the air.
Once you know those three things, awareness, persuasion and
weight, which is GRPs, then you can very effectively determine
and hold your agency's feet to the fire to understand whether
or not what they're putting on air is causing behavioral
change, which is what we want.
So if I were to say is the ad effectiveness, as the
chairman asked me, whether the TV ads were working or not,
would I cut those, absolutely not. TV is the most effective way
for generating awareness. We have seen at P&G that word of
mouth, as an example, can be extremely effective at persuading
people. Although the level of that is smaller, it can be very
effective if you hear about a new car, you hear about a new
movie, it's frequently through word of mouth.
So the important thing I want to stress is measure all
three components, the weight, the awareness and the persuasion
ability of your various ads. But by all means, do it.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Souder. I have a few last questions.
Mr. Zimmerman, could you address this question, the focus
has historically been on, to the degree we have research on
longitudinal, large enough sample size, could you explain how
focus groups might be used in this mix? Because some of the
things you were describing earlier we really need to get the
intensity off of, which you can't in a survey. Also, if I can
ask a secondary question, do you believe that self surveys are
accurate, which is a fundamental assumption in this?
Mr. Zimmerman. There is a definitely a role for focus
groups. I've moderated probably 200 to 300 focus groups myself.
I use them to develop an understanding of why people have the
opinions they do. I would not use those as a replacement for
quantitative measures. Yes, I can measure quantitatively some
of the same things we ask in focus groups. And we frequently do
that.
Your second question was?
Mr. Souder. When you do a new product at Procter and Gamble
and do research, how much of it is based on, for example,
certainly on media buy, or you wouldn't ask whether people ask
the news, they all watch the news, they don't watch game shows.
But where is the line here where self reporting versus actually
measuring arrests in an area, expulsions out of school, should
we cross measure?
Mr. Zimmerman. I would say that the majority of the
research we do is self reported, either by phone interviews or
by questionnaires. This is probably 90, 95 percent. But we also
look for other habits and practices data, which we collect from
secondary sources. And we look at convergence of results, that
we're getting the same results from all three different areas.
We don't depend on any one alone.
Mr. Souder. So if you saw in a given market a successful
reporting of a campaign, but the arrests went up and expulsions
from school went up, you might check to see whether in fact you
had a more aggressive sheriff, or whether the schools are
cracking down. But then you'd look at that as cognitive
dissonance if in fact there hadn't been a change?
Mr. Zimmerman. Yes, and that's where focus groups coming
into being. They're miracle workers. As an example, we had one
school district where we saw very low usage in grades seven and
eight. It suddenly jumped up hugely, it was like a huge step,
grades 9, 10, 11 and 12, marijuana usage was constant. And
alcohol usage was constant. So the data was accurate, we had 85
percent of the kids in this school district self reporting this
was happening. So we said, what's going on?
Well, it turns out the kids in a community meeting said,
oh, that's because of field parties. Everybody goes out after
football games, just like the parents used to do, and they used
to drink pop, the kids are now drinking alcohol and smoking
dope. So the focus group type of activity helped us understand
what was going on. Then we could work with the local law
enforcement community and with the parents to help them
understand what to do next.
You've got to surround the issue with parents, as you've
said, it is extremely important. Our data says parents are
these most important source, faith community and local media.
Mr. Souder. I'll finish with this question, but I'd like to
get your reactions, starting with Dr. Johnston. One of the
things that really troubles me in this process, because you've
highlighted it, I've never heard of a business that doesn't do
market segmentation and targeting. You have to know who you're
going after and why you're advertising or of course it's going
to fail. If we don't know who we're trying to reach with our
ads to win, we're not going after registered voters, if we're
in a primary it's different than the general election, if we
don't know whether we're going for swing voters, we lose. We do
that every day.
The problem I see here is the resources aren't sufficient
to get market clout for all the things you've just identified.
And we're not likely to dramatically change it.
For example, prevention, is one group that you're
targeting, the maintenance is another, and getting somebody off
is a different group. I would like you each to comment on the
adventure seekers. To that degree, they may be more likely to
be in one of those three groups, if we could identify that. Is
that a way to get around that?
Furthermore, if you're already targeting different ads for
those you're trying to prevent from those you're trying to keep
off and those you're trying, in other words, eighth graders or
potentially sixth to eighth graders are coming into the market,
you've got another group that weren't at risk in eighth grade,
but as they go to high school, they start going to parties or
they start to do these things, so they're now becoming at risk.
You have adults who lose their job, in other words, the market
isn't static, either.
Now you've also said that it's best that when you target
certain narcotics, it has an impact. But it doesn't necessarily
have a cross referral. Then there's the whole question of
targeting the parents, which is another whole market. How do
you do this if in fact at best we're going to get probably flat
funding, which is declining every year because of advertising
costs going up? What would you use? Would you do a mixed
strategy?
First off, do you have any comments on what I just said.
Would you use a mixed strategy where you vary it from time to
time? Would you in this try to leverage? Because these are
policy questions. We don't do the ads. Ad people should do the
ads. But these are kinds of fundamental policy questions of
where's our priority as a country, and what's most effective
with that, along with the drug czar and the executive branch,
and who are we targeting. And if it becomes we're targeting
everybody, then we're targeting nobody. We don't have enough
dollars.
Mr. Johnston. That's the problem with having too many
targets. I think the Partnership does do market segmentation in
their research and planning. I can't tell you the details of
it, because I don't know them.
But one of the things we've seen over the years is that
when there has been an important shift, let's say, in marijuana
use among young people, it's almost always due to fewer kids
initiating use, but also to more kids quitting use. And I
suspect that some of the very same messages and influences lead
to both.
I don't think that generally the heavy users, people who
have already got an established pattern, are likely to be very
influenced by marketing kinds of interventions. They are too
mild an intervention for the strength of the behavior. So I
don't think that's probably a realistic part of the market to
target.
But I'm not sure, actually, that the strategy would be too
different if we're talking about trying to prevent initiation
versus getting people to quit. If they say a drug is more
dangerous, both things tend to happen.
Mr. Souder. How did you feel about the sensation seeker
targeting? I'd like to hear Dr. Johnston on that.
Mr. Johnston. Well, Dr. Palmgreen's done a lot more
research on this than I have. I think that very likely that is
a high risk segment, as his research suggests. I don't have a
good, intuitive feel for how effective we can be with them. But
his research suggests that we can. And clearly if we can, those
are some of the higher risk types of individuals that we might
be able to nip the bud early before they do become established.
Mr. Souder. Do you agree with the principle that in
marketing research and focus groups we should be looking at the
higher risk population? Because one of the things that we found
in our community anti-drug initiatives, in our drug-free
schools initiatives, who by the way, the data is even worse
than here overall, it isn't that there isn't data, but that
there isn't even as much scientific data. There's lots of
individual reports and individual programs.
But one of the things is, they tend to be more effective at
reaching kids who are less at risk. It is a fundamental problem
we've had in these programs.
Mr. Johnston. Right. I certainly think it's worth
differentiating them in the research and looking at that and
probably in the evaluations as well. And in a sense, it's an
empirical question, how effective can we be, where do we get
the most bang for our buck. My guess is we need to go after
both segments, the high sensation seeking, which may take a
certain qualitative type of ad, as was suggested, and the rest
of the kids.
We have to remember that drug use is a majority behavior
among our kids by the time they're out of high school. So there
are a lot of people in the population that we have to
influence.
Mr. Souder. Dr. Palmgreen, before you comment, may I ask
you, on your Knoxville and Lexington studies, you showed a
double difference between the two different groups. Did you
have that as heavy use, light use, one time use? In other
words, in fact how much can we isolate them? Because doubling
is pretty significant.
Mr. Palmgreen. Well, our only measure of use was the one
that has been kind of the gold standard, I guess, it's been
used in a lot of national studies, and that's any use in the
last 30 days. Now, that can be misleading sometimes, because
someone may just have used it just one time in the last 30 days
when you ask that person by self-report. But overall, it's a
very good measure of what we call current use of marijuana.
The question that you asked Dr. Johnston about targeting
high sensation seekers, the ONDCP campaign certainly is built,
I know, on social marketing premises. That's one of the reasons
why they were targeting 11 to 13 year olds, because they knew
that this was the blank slate, as Dr. Johnston called it, that
you can write on. They also have been making an attempt to
target high sensation seekers by doing focus groups with high
sensation seekers.
The difficulty, and the real difficulty we faced in
Lexington and Knoxville, was to develop high sensation value
ads, ads that were really dramatic, graphic and so forth, for a
drug like marijuana, which is not like ecstasy or meth or
something or cocaine, where you can produce very graphic ads
that say that use of this drug is going to kill you or cause
other extremely serious physical problems and so on.
We had to, therefore, in Lexington and Knoxville, focus as
much as we could on two things. One, on novelty, try to give
them some ads like they had never seen before, because that's
the primary thing high sensation seekers are looking for. The
second thing was, we wanted to make them dramatic. We wanted to
tell a story. We didn't want someone preaching to them. We
wanted a little narrative. That was very, very important.
This was one of the things they faced, that the Partnership
has faced in producing ads for the ONDCP campaign. I remember
the Partnership coming to us early on in the ONDCP campaign and
telling us that a number of the agencies that they had relied
on in the past to produce ads refused, absolutely refused to
produce or participate in the campaign to produce anti-
marijuana ads, because they felt that marijuana was a drug that
was so mild, as they thought, in fact, they needed some
convincing themselves, that they could not produce really hard
hitting ads on this drug.
Mr. Souder. So maybe we need to drug test our ad agencies.
Because certainly BC Bud, which is the hottest thing in the
street in Boston, it's selling for as much as cocaine, in
Seattle and San Francisco, it's about half, its THC content is
roughly triple what we saw. We're in this mythology of the old
marijuana, Quebec Gold on the East Coast, BC Bud on the West.
In my home city of Fort Wayne, BC Bud is selling for more than
cocaine. There's not a lot of it yet, but we're intercepting
it. It's more like meth. It's a constant moving target.
Ms. Patrick or Mr. Zimmerman, do you have any closing
comments?
Anything else, Mr. Cummings?
Mr. Cummings. I just wanted to thank you all for what
you're doing. This is very, very helpful. I think that we have
to be practical, and we have a limited amount of time, and a
limited amount of space we occupy on this Earth. I think that
we have to be as effective as we can while we're here.
I think the testimony that you have given has been very
balanced and very thoughtful. It's this kind of testimony that
helps us to make the kind of decisions that we have to make.
I've often said if you've got bad information, it's hard to
make a good decision, or lack of information, it's hard to make
a good decision. So we really do appreciate your being here,
and we thank you for what you do every day to make a
difference.
Mr. Souder. Let me add to that my thanks for both being
here and all your work. With that, the subcommittee stands
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:12 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned,
to reconvene at the call of the Chair.]
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