page_title: Partnership for Drug-Free Kids
section_title: The 1990s
hierarchical_section_title: Partnership for Drug-Free Kids / History / The 1990s
caption_attribution_description: Director Robert Zemeckis overseeing the shooting of his 1997 film "Contact"
context_page_description: The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, first known as the Partnership for a Drug-Free America then later as the Partnership at DrugFree.org, is a New York City-based non-profit organization which runs campaigns to prevent teenage drug and alcohol abuse in the United States. It is notable for mobilizing volunteer talent "against a single social problem" to help young people "live their lives free of drug and alcohol abuse," and to assist parents in prevention efforts. The organization gets input from scientists, specialists in communication, researchers and others, and offers resources for parents and teenagers on its website. It focused efforts to "unsell" illegal drugs such as cocaine, heroin, prescription drugs, marijuana, MDMA, and others, as well as discouraging abuse of alcohol and nitrous oxide, by breaking away from a standard public service approach and doing a coordinated media campaign. While the organization has focused drug prevention advertising on broadcast media such as television, there are signs in recent years that it is shifting media support to emerging channels such as video-on-demand, digital technology and particularly the Internet.
context_section_description: In 1989, Johnson & Johnson chief executive James E. Burke took over leadership of the organization. He had been instrumental in growing the large pharmaceutical firm as well as adeptly handling a difficult crisis "in a forthright way" with "decisive leadership" when a terrorist had poisoned bottles of one of the company's products and caused several deaths. Burke brought new contacts and savvy to the operation and a reputation for the highest ethical standards.
  In 1992, the Partnership switched focus somewhat to targeting inner city youth, where the drug problem had been more severe, and ran a campaign led by Ginna Marston. Research suggested most children felt "nearly alone in their hostility toward drugs," so an effort was made to show them that they were not alone. In one television commercial, a camera zooms in and out on two youngsters, one of whom is trying to get the other to try a marijuana cigarette, but the other youngster declines; the tagline says "A friend who offers you drugs is not your friend." It was a "strikingly different tack" from the milder Just Say No campaign championed by previous first lady Nancy Reagan. Commercials written by a former Wieden & Kennedy copywriter were "infused with menace and melodrama" according to one report. Some spots by a Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein copy team hinted that the earlier Just Say No had been simplistic. Marston explained the utility of depicting young people "resisting drugs in real situations":
  The new campaign addresses kids' feelings and their sense of emotional isolation on this issue. ... The problem is not drugs, but an attitude of hopelessness ... They start to feel they don't count, they don't matter. They feel bad about themselves and give up on themselves; those are the ones who get into drugs ... It's not to kill time, as happens in the general market ... but to kill pain.
  — Ginna Marston, 1992, PDFA campaign director.
  The organization picked up real-life horror stories about the effect of drug abuse, and used these stories at times in its commercials. For example, a 28-year-old former drug user met for lunch with the Partnership's Doria Steedman, and at one point "pulled out her [false] teeth" to show the ravages of the drug use; this idea was used in a subsequent commercial. At the same time, different drugs were coming in and out of vogue, sometimes introduced by films such as Trainspotting.
  In 1994, an independent assessment from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine suggested that the anti-drug campaign was having a measurable "deterrence effect" on American adolescents:
  No one presumes advertising is going to stop all drug abuse in America ... Using the idea that attitudes change behavior and using the best ad minds to denormalize drug use, they have sent a very strong message over the years, and their work is a very important component in the national effort to reduce drug use."
  — Chris Policano, spokesman for Phoenix House, in 1994
  Research efforts suggested that a key metric for the agency was getting preteens and teenagers to wait longer and longer before having their "first taste of drugs", since the longer wait period meant that it became less and less likely that a child would become a regular drug user.
  But it had to contend with a pop culture which often used drugs to promote partying, feeling good, and as a stimulus for musical creativity. A music executive commented anonymously in 1996:
  I believe in drug use ... It's part of growing up and the creative process. It's not for me as an individual to interfere with what people are doing with their destiny.
  — report in the Los Angeles Times 1996
  In 1996, Partnership director Ginna Marston noticed, after examining survey data, disturbing trends indicating that not just teenagers, but preteens were showing greater smoking of marijuana and that the problem could no longer be viewed as a "teenage problem only." At a press conference, Marston told reporters of a new media blitz aimed at "getting parents involved in the war against drugs. Survey data showed marijuana use had gone from 230,000 ch
caption: Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis in 1997.
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