Unlikely Bedfellows: Media Literacy and Anti-Drug Education

By Maia Szalavitz, AlterNet. Posted April 8, 2002.

Teachers who visited the federal anti-drug website recently, theantidrug.com, found some unusual suggestions for drug prevention. Just after the drug czar's $3.5 million advertisement linking drug use to terrorism premiered at the Superbowl, the site featured a link to a report about a conference held at the White House last summer on how to use media literacy techniques to keep kids off drugs.

Now, the site's teachers' guide section includes links to two other media literacy lesson plans sponsored by the drug czar's office: Media Literacy for Drug Prevention with the New York Times, posted in February, and Anti-Drug Education with the New York Times, developed last year.

There is, unsurprisingly, an inherent conflict when a government agency partners with media to do "anti-drug education" -- as the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) found to its dismay two years ago, when its behind-the-scenes deal to pay for politically correct content in TV shows and articles was exposed.

This should have been an object lesson in the perils of having a skeptical audience that critiques sources and their objectivity. The Times countered that suggestion with this statement: "Sponsorship from a government agency to run an ad or create a supplement is acceptable, as long as it is clear that the ad or the supplement is sponsored by the government agency. These curricula were clearly marked as 'Developed by The New York Times Newspaper in Education Program with sponsorship from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.'"

Ironically, the enterprise may hold real promise for drug education -- just not in the way the government -- and possibly the New York Times -- intends.

The idea of educating young people to look at media critically took hold in the U.S. in the 1970s, with support largely coming from progressive educators. Now techniques like deconstructing ads to show how corporations influence consumers are so widespread that they are used by health educators seeking to prevent drinking and cigarette use.

This has proved to be one of the most effective methods yet to reduce teen smoking. Research shows that the most effective anti-smoking media campaigns are those in which the ads themselves incorporate lessons torn from the pages of left media literacy and attack evil Big Tobacco for false and misleading advertising.

Using such techniques to fight illegal drugs, however, raises some problems that anti-smoking campaigns don't face. Says Sut Jhally, Professor of Communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, "Given that there's not a lot of representation of illicit drug use in media (and certainly not in advertising), I'm not sure what you would be deconstructing."

One approach suggested at the White House conference is to have kids deconstruct "pro-drug" websites (as examples it gives www.hyperreal.com or www.lycaeum.com).

This presents some risks, however, some of which are mentioned in the report. The authors recognize that some (probably a small) percentage of kids may not previously have known how to access alternative sources of drug information -- such material is often screened by the filters used by schools and some parents.

But beyond worrying about simple exposure, the media lit lessons from the White House conference and those developed by the New York Times offer no suggestions about what to do if the kids find the descriptions of drug use on such sites or in movies and TV more in line with their own experiences than the negative consequences depicted by official anti-drug information.

The conference report goes on to suggest, among other exercises, that youth compare and contrast two different points of view about marijuana and find sites that celebrate marijuana and sites that condemn it. Another exercise asks students to provide one or two key facts and myths (e.g., rumors, incomplete story about a drug's health consequences) about illegal drug use and invites them to see how frequently these are presented on Internet Web sites.

Says Seeta Pena Gangadharan, policy director for the Media Channel, "What struck me at first glance on reading about the conference was that it seems that ONDCP comes in with the assumption that kids, parents and educators will naturally believe that the anti-drug message is right."

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