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Political child abuse
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Founded in 1986, the partnership has garnered hundreds of millions of dollars a year in donated media space and time, hitting its peak with over $360 million annually in both 1990 and 1991. But by 1997, donated media had declined to $222 million, the group was suffering a decrease in both the quantity and quality of its donated space and time, and the targeted teens had become inured to its oft-parodied "This is your brain on drugs" message.

The partnership's chairman, James E. Burke, began to lobby Congress to add money for paid ads to the drug czar's budget. Though then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich didn't need much convincing, other Republicans had to overcome two objections to a new federal expenditure of this size: Some wondered if the highly visible effort would just let the president and other Democrats claim credit as crusading anti-drug warriors; others worried about showering money on Clinton's perceived allies in Hollywood. "Some on the Hill wanted to just cut a check to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America," says one Capitol Hill insider.

Burke and the partnership eventually won the Republicans over. Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds the media campaign, says, "We were persuaded by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America to spend tax dollars" to get the message out in prime time.

So in October 1997, Congress approved an extravagant plan to buy $1 billion worth of anti-drug advertising. The drug office got about $200 million annually for five years, beginning in fiscal year 1998, and was charged with targeting both the nation's youth and "adult influencers." The office billed the job in a 1998 press release as "the largest and most complex social-marketing campaign ever undertaken."

Approximately two-thirds of the office's ad budget was targeted at TV; the rest was sprinkled among everything from billboards to radio, newspaper, magazine and Internet advertising.

But Congress, feeling that the networks should also contribute to the war on drugs, drove a hard, two-for-one bargain: for every ad the government bought, it demanded another of equal value for free.

"It was contingent on a private-sector match," says John Bridgeland, former chief aide to Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who fought for the deal. "No member of Congress was going to pass new money for this without a match" -- that is, without that second ad slot.

Indeed, with only $1 billion budgeted to it by Congress, the office refers to its "five-year, $2 billion ... campaign." McCaffrey himself called it "our major prevention initiative, the $2 billion five-year Anti-Drug Media Campaign."

The government's paid ads began running on five of the nation's networks, all but lowly UPN, during the summer of 1998. One TV ad features a scruffy, plain-spoken teen who boasts of a sterling academic record before succumbing to marijuana and getting thrown out of the house. Then there's the one mentioned above: the waif-like Gen-Xer taking a frying pan to her kitchen, supposedly to demonstrate the terrors of heroin addiction. The actress is budding young star Rachael Leigh Cook of "She's All That."

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How did the networks' two-for-one ad deal evolve into a plan to insert messages into programming content? Bridgeland says that wasn't the original idea. "I don't think we thought of programming content as a match ... [It] was not actively discussed," he says -- a point that Kolbe echoes.

The half-price deal got a mixed reception from the networks. NBC, the most highly rated network in 1998, with the most valuable ad slots, initially balked for some three months. The chief ad buyer for the drug czar's office, Zenith Media Services Inc. CEO Richard Hamilton, oversaw negotiations with the networks. NBC, he says, made a "business decision."

Then in the ratings doldrums, ABC had fewer qualms. Says Bart Catalane, former CFO of ABC Broadcasting: "Given the way ad-spending had been going, we needed every category, particularly a growing one like government spending. We wanted to grab every share we could." Indeed, the first year of the office's ad campaign, ABC grabbed nearly $30 million worth, half again as much as Fox, its nearest rival at $20 million.

Even high-flying NBC eventually went along; participants say that the network came around after hearing about its rivals' barrels of government cash. Half a loaf was considered better than none, especially from a baker with a projected five-year supply of flour. "This was before the market got so tight," says one former contractor to the drug-policy office. "This was before all the dot-com ads. When we started, the market was less bullish."

But selling time at half price never went down smoothly, and Hamilton reported back that the networks weren't happy. Hence, in the spring of 1998, Alan Levitt, who runs the office's advertising campaign, and Zenith boss Hamilton cooked up the novel idea of using programming -- that is, the plots of sitcoms and dramas -- to redeem the second ad slot owed the government.

"We did this to make it a little bit more obtainable to participants," Levitt says. "I know it's allowed us to make some deals we wouldn't normally make before. There are some media outlets that have not been able to -- are not financially able, or they don't have the structure where they can give us print space or programming or time. And so we can make it more flexible for them."

That spring of 1998, Hamilton and Levitt agreed that sitcoms and dramas that met with the drug-policy office's approval could be used in lieu of the ad slots still owed to the government. Formulas would be applied to determine the cash value of these embedded messages, and the networks would then be free to resell the commercials they otherwise would have given to the government.

Ultimately, the ONDCP developed an accounting system to decide which shows would be valued and for how much. And its officials began to vet television shows in advance, sometimes suggesting alterations. Tapes of the show as broadcast were sent to the office or its ad buyer to be assigned a final monetary value, which would then be subtracted from the total the particular network owed the office.

Next page | The government starts to edit shows