Drug Czar Super Bowl Ad Features Anti-Abortion Subtext

By Daniel Forbes, DrugWar.com. Posted January 31, 2003.

No, the White House anti-drug ads don't work, the latest, stealth report from the federal government indicates. Commissioned by the Office of National Drug Control Policy and conducted under the auspices of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, it states: "There is no evidence yet consistent with a desirable effect of the [Media] Campaign on youth." Though this semi-annual report builds on the poor results documented previously, the taxpayer-funded ads - despite their demonstrated inability to keep kids from drugs - do serve any number of purposes. One new use for the campaign made its debut during the year's high-profile advertising showcase, Sunday's Super Bowl.

As Joseph R. Giganti, Director of Media and Government Relations at the American Life League stated after reviewing the new anti-marijuana ad - entitled "Pregnancy" - on ONDCP's website, "Without question, there is a very strong but subtle pro-life statement presented in this commercial."

Saying that "abortion on demand" thrives on the notion that actions lack consequences, Giganti added, "This ad reinforces the consequences." Still commenting on the ad, he said, you can't "just slice and dice a baby and everything'll be good."

As to the ad's outcome of a young teenager having her baby, Mary Jane Gallagher, Chief Operating Officer of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said, "They coded the message to make it seem this was this woman's only option." According to Gallagher, "Such speaking down to viewers - that keeping the child is the only alternative - I'm not used to that from the government in a democracy."

Alerted to the ad, Nellie Gray, President of the March for Life Fund and organizer of the annual anti-Roe v. Wade demonstrations in Washington, said: "A government agency properly uses this scene of a pregnant mother's drug abuse and grandparents' youth to help viewers understand that there is no justification for anyone intentionally killing a preborn baby." As to any possible ill effects on the baby from the mother's "drug abuse," Gray added that her group has a "no exceptions, no compromise" policy on abortion.

I've reported on the Clinton White House granting the networks some $22 million in ad time they owed it in exchange for inserting government-approved (and even government scripted), anti-drug plots in TV shows. More than one source worried that if the government got away with that, there'd be scant reason to limit its social engineering to drugs. Someday, some administration gripped by a perceived responsibility to instruct people how to live might soon train its sights on reproductive rights, or so these First Amendment advocates thought. Fearing that anti-abortion themes might conceivably start cropping up in sitcoms and dramas, no one worried they'd be flaunted in the ads themselves.

Well, the Clinton Federal Communications Commission eventually ruled the government couldn't pay for messages embedded in TV shows without alerting viewers to that fact. Such notice robbing those messages of much of both their ability to influence viewers and their appeal to government social marketers, the Bush administration commendably scrapped that part of its anti-drug campaign.

However, it took only about a year of his running the national ad campaign for Bush Drug Czar John Walters to launch his first attack on abortion in the guise (or so said the two anti-abortion activists quoted above) of his increasingly outrageous ads.

The woman holding the pregnancy test strip in the ONDCP Super Bowl ad is certainly young and curvy enough that, in a cute little bit of misdirection, viewers no doubt assumed the test was for her, especially since her daughter is off-camera. But we soon learn the parents of the girl who looks about 14 and got pregnant via the demon weed, are - pay attention now, America - soon to be, "the youngest grandparents in town." Ramming the point home, the ad tells us, "There will be an addition to their family soon." As for the also young, but balding grandfather-to-be, he probably doesn't look nearly as frayed by life as he soon will.

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