    [House Hearing, 107 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                    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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                         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:]
        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 86964.001

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 86964.002

        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:]
        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 86964.003

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 86964.004

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 86964.005

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 86964.006

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 86964.007

        [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 86964.008

        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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