Anti-drug Campaigns Research Articles

First and Third Person Perceptions on Anti-Drug Ads Among Adolescents

The perceived as well as actual (in) effectiveness of anti-drug ads has been prominent in public discourse and concern. Using the third person effect hypothesis, this study examined adolescents' perceptions on the effect of anti-drug ads and the perception's relationship to attitudes and intentions concerning drug use. The results suggested that adolescents estimated the anti-drug ad effect on the basis of their behavioral experience, the self-anchored expectancy of a pro-social media effect: Those who had used drugs anticipated the effect of anti-drug ads to be smaller than those who had not used drugs. The perceived informative realism of anti-drug ads influenced the perceived message quality, which in turn influenced the perceived effect on self. The perceived effect on self was positively associated with anti-drug attitudes and intentions. The implications on future third person perception research and anti-drug campaign efforts are discussed.

Comparison of drug abuse in Germany and China

Drug abuse has a long, but also different history in Germany and China. The Opium War largely influenced the history of China in 19th century; however, China was once recognized as a drug-free nation for 3 decades from the 1950s to the 1980s. Drug abuse has spread quickly since re-emerging as a national problem in China in the late 1980s. The number of registered drug abusers increased from 70 000 in 1990 to more than 1 million by the end of 2005. In past decades, illicit drug trafficking and production have swept most provinces in China, and drug abuse has caused many problems for both abusers and the community. One major drug-related problem is the spread of HIV, which has caused major social and economic damage in China. Germany, the largest developed European country, also faces the drug and addiction problem. Germany has about 150 000 heroin addicts, for whom HIV/AIDS has become a serious threat since the mid 1980s. To control the drug problem, the German Government adopted the “Action Plan on Drugs and Addiction” in 2003; the China Central Government approved a similar regulation in the antidrug campaign in 2005. Germany has experience in reducing drug-related harm. The methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) program has run for more than 20 years and the public has become more tolerant of addicts. In 2003, China began the MMT program for controlling the spread of HIV/AIDS. It is necessary for China to learn from developed countries to acquire success in its antidrug campaign. In this review, we will go over the differences and similarities in drug abuse between Germany and China. The differences are related to history, population and economics, drug policy context, drug laws, HIV/hepatitis C virus infection, the MMT program and so on. These 2 nations have drug abuse problems with different histories and currently use different approaches to handle illicit drug marketing and use. The legal penalties for illicit drug offences reflect the social differences of these 2 nations with respect to the seriousness of particular types of crimes. The characteristics of the MMT program may also influence patterns of drug abuse in these 2 nations and China should improve the MMT program based on the successful model in Europe, the USA, and Australia. We recommend more dialogue and collaboration between Germany and China.

Alcohol y publicidad en la prensa escrita en España

Alcohol advertising is a powerful factor of incitation to consumption. We analyzed the alcohol advertising, especially that youth-focused, in written mass media in Spain during the period 2002-2006. Annual cross-sectional study of advertisements in 41 widely difused written mass media (average readers: 10,1 millions). Media admitting alcohol publicity were 29% in the whole. (2,9 millions of readers on average, 29% of total readers). Alcohol advertising constituted the 3,8% of global publicity and the 8,6% of the publicity in media admitting alcohol publicity. In this period only 4% of the media (2,4% of total readers) inserted antidrug campaigns. In brief, three out of 10 total readers and one out of 12 people older than 15 years suffered the impact of tobacco advertising. Young people were included in 33% of alcohol advertisements and 3 out of 6 of youth-oriented magazines permitted a such publicity. Alcohol publicity remains high in written mass media in Spain. By contrast few people received informative antidrug campaigns. Advertising was preferentially directed to young people.

Drug Problems in China

Drug crime in China is on an overall rising trend. Major drug crime cases are becoming more common, the types of drugs being trafficked are more diverse, and the smuggling and trafficking of drugs into the country and the smuggling of precursor chemicals out of the country have formed a bidirectional cycle. Drug crimes in China have also begun to show a conspicuous trend of internationalization. China's main countermeasures against drug crimes have been to pass new laws and regulations against drugs, to increase the efforts to eradicate cultivation, to establish and expand "drug-free communities" programs, and to strengthen international cooperation in antidrug campaigns. The existing problems demand prompt solutions, which include a shortage of funding and lack of accurate knowledge about prevalence of drug abuse and related data for scientifically studying the drug problems.

Commentary on Fok MSM & Tsang WYW (2005) Development of an instrument measuring Chinese adolescent beliefs and attitudes towards substance abuse. Journal of Clinical Nursing 14, 986–994

I read with interest the article by Fok and Tsang (2005) and commend their study attempts to develop and test their Beliefs and Attitudes of Substance Abuse Inventory (BASAI) tool for gauging and measuring adolescent perspectives on drug-abuse. Recently, I had an article published that looks to place in context the risk-taking behaviour (including illicit drug use) of many adolescents as part of a normalising ‘health journey’ into adulthood (Whitehead 2005). It is against this context that I wish to make further comments that, in the absence of finer detail in Fok and Tsang’s article, may either complement or challenge its intention. Fok and Tsang (2005) state in their opening background that the need for their BASAI tool is set against the context of ‘drug-abuse’, ‘anti-drug campaigns’ and ‘the immediate concern of child and adolescent health professionals’. I agree with their premise that it is essential to develop effective, valid and reliable instruments to measure these issues as they relate to adolescents and to, subsequently, develop more targeted interventions – but, I also have concerns as to exactly what this means in their article and to what extent the language used is contextually appropriate. For instance, I believe that Fok and Tsang set a potentially bias precedence by referring consistently to ‘drug-abuse’. It is unknown if they mean ‘drug-abuse’ to represent all illicit drug-taking practices (against say a criminal context) or, by abuse in terms of extent and effects of such practices (say for heavy users with adverse sideeffects). If it is the former then this has the potential to reinforce negative and unhelpful stereotypes and unearth limiting culturally based factors. Not all societies view drug-taking (especially recreational use) or alleged health effects in the same context – especially if we consider the paradox of ‘socially acceptable’ drug-abuse, i.e. tobacco and alcohol consumption. If it is the latter context, then we should acknowledge that the drivers and motivators that underpin extreme risk-laden health ‘abuse’ make it unlikely that preventative programmes will either appeal to or work on those affected. My main argument here, however, is that we must guard against the development of tools that may potentially penalize, criminalize or stereotype adolescent health-related experiences – in an attempt to prevent or deny potentially valid experiences. Judgemental, stereotypical and hierarchical approaches to health-damaging behaviour, that advocate punishment as opposed to remediation, are known to have a negative and disempowering impact (Scriven & Stiddard 2003, Evans-Whipp et al. 2004). There is a need here to establish further the context against the adolescent ‘health journey’ that I spoke of earlier. There is an emerging body of accepted literature that is establishing the dilemmas of health-educating behavioural change – when viewed alongside the confounding parameters of risk, resistance, reactance, rationality and the ‘pleasure principle’ (see Whitehead & Russell 2004, Whitehead 2005). In measuring adolescent behaviour we ignore these factors at the cost of alienating the clients that we seek to target and help. Health education programmes, involving young people, are laudable but often have a negligible effect if the understanding of health issues is not explored within them (Brannen & Storey 1998, Lowe 2001). For instance, Fox (2002) suggests that risk-laden health-related behaviour often represents an ‘experiment in living’, where the individual is merely testing what their body is capable of and trying to make sense of what is physically, emotionally and spiritually possible. Similarly, Scriven and Stevenson (1998, p. 91) state that:

Targeting Norm-Related Beliefs About Marijuana Use in an Adolescent Population

The integrative model of behavior prediction and priming theory were used to evaluate the effects of antimarijuana advertisements in an experimental context. In 1 original study and 2 replications, 435 adolescents were randomly assigned to condition, and those in the experimental condition viewed 3 ads that challenged undesirable normative beliefs about marijuana use. The results showed that ad exposure had small but positive (antidrug) effects on adolescents' considerations of the outcomes of using marijuana and their perceptions of the social normative climate surrounding marijuana use. Priming effects also were observed but generally ran counter to predictions. Implications of the findings for antidrug campaigns are discussed. Potential explanations for the unexpected priming effects also are offered.

Drug Abuse in Travelers to Southeast Asia: An On-Site Study

Drug abuse constitutes a major sociomedical problem throughout the world. A unique subgroup with a higher potential of drug abuse are young travelers to Southeast Asia. Less than a handful of studies have focused on this population, and even fewer have been carried out on site. Our aim was to characterize the phenomenon of drug abuse among Israelis and other nationals, and to define risk factors that would predict which travelers are prone to abusing drugs. Data was collected through questionnaires that were distributed in Southeast Asia to 430 travelers. Medical students administered the questionnaires across India, Thailand, Nepal, Vietnam, and Laos during 2002 and 2003. Questionnaires from 231 Israelis and 199 other nationals (mostly from the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, and Germany) were analyzed. These travelers had a mean age of 25.3 years. We found that 54.3% of the travelers abused drugs during the trip. Israelis (66.2%) abused drugs more frequently than did non-Israelis (40.7%, p < .001). Males abused drugs significantly more than females did, as did secular more than religious people; however, those with an academic degree abused drugs less than others. For 23.5% of the Israelis, the trip was their first encounter with drugs. Of the entire cohort, 72% abused cannabis products, and most of them (49.6%) did it on daily basis. The use of "hard" drugs (eg, lysergic acid diethylamide) was more common among non-Israelis than among the Israelis (37% and 20%, respectively; p < .006). Much higher rates of drug abuse (70.1%) were found in India than in other Southeast Asian countries. Logistic regression identified that prior use of drugs, Israeli nationality, travel to India, cigarette smoking, and traveling alone were significant predictors of drug abuse. There is a disturbingly high rate of drug abuse in travelers to certain Southeast Asian countries, both among Israeli and other nationals. For many youngsters, this is their first encounter with drugs, and many plan to continue abusing drugs upon their repatriation. Travelers to Southeast Asia should be a major target group for primary, preventive, antidrug campaigns worldwide.

"The Pill You Love Can Turn on You": Feminism, Tranquilizers, and the Valium Panic of the 1970s

This essay analyzes the cultural politics of a late-1970s Valium addiction scare in the context of other episodes of American drug hysteria. Since the days of "Demon Rum," antidrug campaigns in the U.S. typically associated drugs with marginal populations such as immigrants, nonwhites, or the urban poor. The "drug menace" helped dramatize the threat posed by such "dangerous classes" to "our" society, while mobilizing state police power to control it. The Valium panic was a different matter, involving a quintessentially middle-class drug prescribed legally by reputable physicians for their respectable patients, and popularly recognized as an entrenched part of life in the comfortable classes, especially for women. Its emergence signaled important but little-examined changes in American drug politics, and raised the prospect of a new kind of antidrug warrior. Central to creating the Valium addiction scare were certain white, middle-class segments of the diverse "second-wave" feminist movement, who redeployed the powerful cultural tools of the drug war for their own agendas. They revised classic drug-scare narratives to sensationalize Valium addiction as a central symbol of sexism, and held up liberation from the "mother's little helper" as an archetypal story of self-emancipation through feminism. This was a remarkable campaign, earning new audiences for feminist political messages and challenging the punitive logic of the 20th century's "war against drugs." It was also, however, limited in important ways by the class and race dynamics of American drug politics. The stories about Valium addiction they constructed for popular consumption traded on assumptions of white, middle-class women's essential innocence in a way that excluded—and even reified—the "dangerous classes" as a different sort of drug user. And yet, their success in reworking the anti-drug tradition for their own ends challenges us to imagine exactly that: a "war against drugs" rebuilt as a civil rights campaign, challenging rather than reinforcing cultural stereotypes.

Recent trends in drug abuse in China1

Drug abuse has spread quickly since reemerging as a national problem in China in the late 1980s. The number of registered drug abusers increased from 70,000 in 1990 to more than one million by the end of 2004. In addition to opioids, abuse of 'new' types of drugs including 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and ketamine has spread since 1997. Illicit drug trafficking and production have swept most of southern China, and throughout the country drug abuse has caused many problems for both abusers and the community. One major drug-related problem is the spread of HIV, which has caused major social and economic damage in China. In response, the Chinese government has begun an anti-drug campaign, including legislative measures to control drug abuse. However, changing the public's attitudes toward drug abusers and breaking the link between drug use and HIV spread are equally important.

Enlisting the Influence of Others: Alternative Strategies for Persuasive Media Campaigns

This study investigated an Australian antidrug campaign that targeted adolescents directly and indirectly via recruiting parents into drug prevention. Eighty‐six parent–child dyads completed surveys measuring campaign evaluations, discussions about drugs, and beliefs about risks to self (own child) and to the average young Australian. Adolescents were optimistic about risks, and media impact was evident only in perceptions of risk to others. Parents were less optimistic, and perceptions of campaign quality predicted perceived risk to own child and discussion about drugs. However, this was moderated by negative affect associated with the campaign. There was some evidence that discussions influenced adolescents' perceptions of personal risk. This demonstrates the importance of individual responses and communication processes in determining the impact of persuasive media messages.

Tabaco y medios de comunicación escritos en España: una atracción fatal

Objective Tobacco advertising is a powerful factor in encouraging smoking initiation. We analyzed tobacco advertising in written mass media in Spain between 2002 and 2005. Methods We performed an annual cross-sectional study of advertisements in the 41 most widely disseminated written mass media (nearly 10 million readers). Results In the period studied, 37% of the media included tobacco advertising (an average of 4.35 million readers). Only 4% of the media included anti-drug campaigns (an average of 0.27 million readers). Tobacco advertising increased from 2.0 to 4.7% (overall) and from 4.3 to 8.0% (in media allowing tobacco advertising). Four out of every 10 readers and one out of eight Spaniards aged 15 years or older were exposed to tobacco advertising. Fifty-six percent of advertisements included young people. Conclusions Tobacco advertising remains prominent in written mass media in Spain and was mainly directed at young people.

Drug Wars and Wonder Drugs

Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics. By Curtis Marez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 347 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs. By Jonathan Michel Metzl. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. 275 pages. $24.95 (cloth). $10.95 (paper). At a certain moment in the 1960s, it would not have been surprising to hear reports of counterculture avatars such as Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey calling on Americans to alter their consciousness with drugs—to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." The call was to hedonism, but it also had a distinctive political undercurrent: if enough minds could be liberated through drugs, revolutionary social change would inevitably follow. The key was to take illegal "consciousness-expanding" drugs such as marijuana and LSD, and not commercially produced tranquilizers and other legal agents of conformity. In this psychic politics, control over access to drugs loomed as more important than control over the means of production. This kind of rhetoric seems impossibly dated forty years later. Illicit drugs may still have their partisans, but they do not tend to be social revolutionaries, and antidrug campaigns (and advertisements for commercial medicines) far outweigh them in cultural visibility and influence. The notion that drugs hold some essential key to higher consciousness and social transformation seems laughable and—in an era of reenergized antidrug campaigning—downright dangerous for anyone foolish enough to espouse it too loudly. If paeans to illegal drugs have fallen out of vogue in the mass media, however, skepticism about drugs and drug control have persisted in the far less celebrated realm of academic scholarship—and for good reason. Since the 1950s, hundreds of millions of Americans have taken prescription mood medicines (psychotropes) such as Valium or Prozac each year, altering perceptions of "the good life" and helping make the pharmaceutical industry one of the mightiest sectors of the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, recent presidential elections [End Page 1231] testify to the continuing significance of the twentieth century's "wars against drugs": the margins of victory have, by some measures, been smaller than the number of drug-crime felons (disproportionately nonwhite) ineligible to vote. It does not take a drug evangelist to recognize that consciousness and the chemical means to alter it have been, and remain, important arenas of cultural and political striving and conflict. The "war against drugs" and the psychotropic phenomenon receive new and valuable attention from Curtis Marez's Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics and Jonathan Metzl's Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs. Both books trace how and why particular groups of Americans—police, immigrant laborers, psychiatrists—worked to establish drugs as a public spectacle, infusing them with intense and often contradictory political valences. Marez argues that both state agents and "subaltern" insurgents exploited drugs as a cultural terrain for developing and contesting ideas about imperial power relationships (9). Metzl, examining medical and popular representations of psychotropes since the 1950s, finds them populated by gendered images and discourses supposedly vanquished from American psychiatry when "wonder pills" replaced psychoanalysis (7). Drug Wars and Prozac on the Couch look beyond drug takers to drugs' many other "users": those who sell, police, prescribe, or tell stories about drugs through advertisements, antidrug campaigns, music, memoirs, and so forth. These "users" leveraged drugs' powerful but ambiguous psychic effects into even more potent political, economic, and cultural ones. Metzl and Marez, then, model how American studies scholars might look to cultural analysis of drugs as part of a wide range of inquiries, rather than only within the specialized field of drug history. Marez and Metzl are part of a larger trend in drug scholarship. Several scholars, for example, analyze how stories about addicts and crime have been used to dramatize race and gender stereotypes, shaping the nature and extent of police control over poor or nonwhite cityscapes.1 Others identify international drug trafficking—legal and illegal—as a financial pillar of...

La communauté thérapeutique du pénitencier de Donnacona : un an déjà !

It was in 1987 that the program for the treatment of drug addiction was started at the Donnacona Penitentiary, based on the Therapeutic Community model. It was one of the regional initiatives taken under the National Anti-Drug campaign launched in the spring of 1987. This program is to be the major regional undertaking in Quebec in the field of antidrug programs in the prison milieu. In this article, we discuss the program as it is applied at Donnacona and the persons who work there as counsellors. We then draw a general criminological profile of the inmates that are following the program and the results obtained. Finally, we mention some of the strong points of the program and some of its limitations or difficulties in applying this model in the prison milieu.

Table of Contents

Alcoholism & Drug Abuse WeeklyVolume 17, Issue 16 p. 1-8 Table of Contents First published: 23 August 2005 https://doi.org/10.1002/adaw.20201716AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Baltimore Officials Credit Saved Lives to Peer Administration of Narcan GAO Report Says ONDCP Anti-Drug Campaign Didn't Overpay Consultants How ONDCP Measures Response to the Anti-Drug Media Campaign Appropriate Spending for the Anti-Drug Media Campaign Cost Calculator Helps Employers Manage Problem Drinking A Breakdown of Problem Drinkers, by Industry Profile Alcohol Advertising in Magazines Continues to Overexpose Youth Data Confirm SAMHSA's Efforts Toward Young Adolescents Names in the News Resources Briefly Noted Coming Up… Volume17, Issue1618 April 2005Pages 1-8 RelatedInformation

Global drug prohibition: its uses and crises

In the 20th century, political leaders and governments throughout the world supported drug prohibition and constructed a global drug prohibition system. They did so because of the influence of the USA and its allies and the UN. This article suggests they also did so because drug prohibition, drug demonisation and anti-drug campaigns were very useful—especially to politicians, the police, the military, and the media. Now in the 21st century, global drug prohibition is facing several overlapping crises. The growth of the harm reduction movement has increasingly pushed drug policies in many countries from the more criminalized end of the drug prohibition continuum to the more regulated and tolerant end. Further, a serious, reputable and ever growing opposition to punitive drug policies has begun to challenge global drug prohibition itself. Finally, drug prohibition appears to be unable to prevent the increasing cultivation, use, and normalization of cannabis throughout the world. Because of these currently unstoppable developments, global drug prohibition is losing some of its invisibility and political invulnerability.

Can We Measure Encoded Exposure? Validation Evidence From a National Campaign

Exposure is often cited as an explanation for campaign success or failure. A lack of validation evidence for typical exposure measures, however, suggests the possibility of either misdirected measurement or incomplete conceptualization of the idea. If whether people engage campaign content in a basic, rudimentary manner is what matters when we talk about exposure, a recognition-based task should provide a useful measure of exposure, or what we might call encoded exposure, that we can validate. Data from two independent sources, the National Survey of Parents and Youth (NSPY) and purchase data from a national antidrug campaign, offer such validation. Both youth and their parents were much more likely to recognize actual campaign advertisements than to claim recognition of bogus advertisements. Also, gross rating points (GRPs) for a campaign advertisement correlated strikingly with average encoded exposure for an advertisement among both youth (r = 0.82 ) and their parents (r = 0.53 ).

Anti-Drug Campaigns and State Building : China's Experiences in the 1950s

Anti-Drug Campaigns and State Building : China's Experiences in the 1950s

Anti-Drug Campaigns and State Building : China's Experiences in the 1950s

China's anti-drug crusade in the 1950s successfully eliminated the centuries-long epidemic of opium abuse. This paper, using newly available materials, reconstructs a brief history of the campaign and answers the question that why the crusade was kept invisible to the outside world until the mid 1990s. By focusing on the ways the crusade was carried out in the historical contexts of the early People's Republic, it demonstrates that the crusade was a presentation of the Communists' desire for a "new China" identity and was an integral part of the state-building process. The second part of this paper challenges the common assumption that China succeeded in eradicating its drug problem in the early 1950s, and examines how and why prolonged drug suppression campaigns were conducted differently in the Yi and Tibetan areas in the mid to late 1950s. The paper argues that the application of different policies was consistent with the CCP's state-building efforts at that time. ZY

Developing a theory-based anti-drug communication campaign for Hispanic children and parents.

Recent research suggests some alarming substance abuse trends among Hispanic/Latino adolescents. Children in this age group are at a particularly vulnerable juncture in their lives, and early prevention efforts are warranted. For a national anti-drug campaign targeting this young Hispanic/Latino audience and their parents, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America are incorporating culturally appropriate messages based on behavioral science research and theories. The purpose of this article is to provide information and recommendations on relevant factors and influences in the Hispanic/Latino culture that should be addressed in designing and implementing this campaign.

The Drug Czar's Anti-Drug Media Campaign: Continuing Concerns

In reviewing the anti-drug media campaign organized by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), we expressed concern about both its strategic direction and execution (Journal of Health Communication, 1999, 4:2 155-160). The response from ONDCP's director, General Barry R. McCaffrey, still leaves us concerned about the campaign's chances for success. We review ONDCP's strong opposition to including alcohol in the campaign, its continued reliance on fear appeals, and its relative inattention to building support for environmental prevention strategies. We voice again our concerns about ONDCP's underutilization of an expert review committee of behavioral scientists.