Partnership for a Drug-Free America

Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) is a non-profit organization founded by Richard T O'Reilly in 1986 as a project of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Its publicly stated goal, to reduce the demand for narcotics amongst young people by using the various advertising outlets of the mass media to change their attitudes towards illegal drugs, is based on an idea by Philip Joanou, (chairman of Dailey and Associates in Los Angeles), that marketing techniques can be used to help "unsell" narcotics. The presumption being that if advertising can influence individuals to purchase products, then it may also be possible to influence the choice of whether or not to experiment with or use narcotics.

PDFA's early strategy was based on a concept put forward by Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, (president of the Phoenix House treatment programs in New York), who had theorized that the high level of drug use and addiction in the early 1980s was due to the "normalization" of narcotics since the mid-1960s. According to Dr Rosenthal, it would not be possible to achieve significant progress in the War on Drugs until individual and sub-cultural attitudes that were accepting of drugs were reversed, or "denormalized".

The organization first entered the wider public consciousness in 1987, with its This is Your Brain on Drugs broadcast and print public service advertisements (PSAs), which used the analogy that if a person's brain is an egg, then using drugs would be like frying it. This, in addition to a PSA where a television, a trip to Paris and a new car all disappear right under the nose of a cocaine user and another about how a drug-induced high is like diving into an empty swimming pool, were all praised in a speech given to those involved executively with PDFA by then-President George H W Bush in late 1989.

PDFA has a relatively small number of full-time staff, who manage the volunteer efforts of research firms, advertising agencies and the media. From whom PDFA receives donated television and radio spots and pro bono advertising time for them plus advertising space for posters, all in a fairly similar manner to the war bond drive during the Second World War. Overall media efforts are directed at achieving the objective of getting a million Dollars a day in donated time and space. Hypothetically, this results in the delivery of approximately one anti-drug message per household per day. All major national media are visited personally by PDFA staff to monitor the program. State and local broadcasting programs are also developed by sending sales representatives, who cajol them into donating further air time for PSAs. Companies that offer their services for free or corporations that donate funds are able to benefit commercially by disseminating PDFA's message, via increased brand visibility and writing off donations as tax breaks, as well as receive gains to their publc image. PDFA also participates in the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, co-ordinated by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). At the core of which is a paid advertising program featuring messages produced by PDFA, who donates all PSAs to the campaign.

The organization's tracking research is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and directed by Harris Interactive, formerly known as the Gordon S Black Corporation. The annual Partnership Attitude Tracking Survey (PATS) uses a centrally located sampling to evaluate attitudes toward narcotics amongst pre-teens, teenagers and adults.

Public criticism
PDFA was the subject of criticism when it was revealed that their federal tax returns showed that they had received several million dollars worth of funding from major pharmaceutical, tobacco and alcohol corporations, an issue which has been linked to the organization's lack of media discouraging the misuse of legal drugs. From 1997 it has discontinued any fiscal association with tobacco and alcohol suppliers, although it still is in receipt of donations from pharmaceutical producers.

Several of its PSAs have been criticized for being misleading, sometimes deliberately. Most notably, it was forced to discontinue one which purportedly showed a flat-lining EEG read-out of a drug user's brain, which, in fact, it was not at all. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) also called into question another PSA, which linked statistics relating to violent crime and marijuana use.

Drug counselling organizations involved with outreach, have also felt that PDFA's hardline stance against all illegal drugs is unhelpful to their work, believing that PDFA tends to demonize narcotics use beyond what observation would support and thus can result in a loss of trust by young people when their personal observations of drug use fail to agree with the image that PDFA puts forth.

More recently, an attempt by PDFA to conflate the War on Drugs with the War on Terrorism through PSAs that attempted to show causal links between drug trafficking and terrorist groups, was also criticized due to the links pointed out being quite weak and broad, (as well as being applicable to numerous consumer products) and that they seemed to ignore the fact that the Taliban had actually been virulently opposed to opium poppy growers in Afghanistan. By focusing on the repercussions of the narcotics trade (As opposed to the drugs themselves), the PSAs have also created an opportunity to recommend legalization and regulation as a means of removing criminal elements from the trade, an idea that PDFA has rejected.

Satire
Some of the campaigns run by the PDFA have been either satirized or referred to in popular media.

In the comedy film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, John Cho and Kal Penn's characters are watching the Harmless PSA whilst intoxicated from marijuana. The advertisement in question features two teen boys smoking marijuana; one of them handles a gun and then fatally shoots himself, saying, "I'm so high, nothing can hurt me!".

The South Park episode "My Future Self 'n' Me" reflects on some campaigns run by the PDFA. A couple of exaggerations such as "pot making one into a terrorist" and the infamous "Harmless" commercial are mentioned.

An episode of Robot Chicken parodied the 1998 version of the This is Your Brain on Drugs PSA, where Rachael Leigh Cook destroys the egg, then the kitchen, and promptly goes on a rampage in a residential area, hitting everything (and everyone) in sight with her frying pan.

The Family Guy episode "Boys Do Cry" featured a main character, Meg, lying on the couch deflated in reference to a PDFA commercial.