Four ads showing true stories about young people hurting themselves so doctors will prescribe them opioids will begin streaming to the public as part of the White House’s long-awaited media campaign against mass drug overdoses.
The effort is one of the ways that the White House is planning to address the opioid crisis, whose death toll has been climbing, to more than 42,000 in 2016. The stories in the ads are from young people who came forward to share what they did to get prescriptions for addictive narcotics, including crashing a car on purpose and smashing an arm in the door.
The campaign, known as the “Truth About Opioids” emphasizes that “opioid dependence can happen after just five days,” and asks young people to “share the truth and spread the truth.” It is a partnership among the Trump administration; the Ad Council, the creators of the well-known ads “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk;” and the Truth Initiative, which has been credited for bringing down smoking through its public awareness campaigns.
The effort will benefit from free ad space provided by media partners and creators donating their time to help produce the ads. The government will be spending just over $384,000 on the effort, an official from the Office of National Drug Control Policy told the Washington Examiner after the media call.
Kellyanne Conway, senior counselor to the president, said in response to a question from the Washington Examiner that the campaign would not be using the $100,000 in donated funds from Trump’s salary.
Previously, Eric Hargan, the acting director of the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the salary would go toward a public awareness campaign that would inform the public about the dangers of opioid addiction.
When pressed on the matter, Conway said that the administration had several ways to raise public awareness.
“It includes advertising but includes so many different ways to engage the public,” she said. “A large-scale campaign doesn’t necessarily mean ads.”
Companies such as Amazon, Vice, YouTube, and Facebook will run the ads, Sherman said. Past campaigns such as this typically cost about $30 million, she said. They will run online, on TV and on social media.
“These are pre-commitments from companies who are absolutely invested in helping to solve this problem,” she said.
Jim Carroll, the acting director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the ads are examples of different situations that have played out across the country. He said he often hears from people that they weren’t aware of the dangers of opioids. For instance, that they could develop a dependency after receiving a prescription for a drug such as OxyContin from a doctor, or that they might buy pills on the street that are tainted with a highly lethal drug known as fentanyl. People often don’t know where to seek help, he added.
The ads, Carroll said, were “designed to close that knowledge gap so we can turn the tide on this crisis.”
Young people are not the largest demographic affected by opioid deaths; most overdoses occur between the ages of 24 and 25, and that group is closely followed by adults between the ages of 45 to 54.
Koval said the 18 to 24 range was selected because young people tend to abuse prescription painkillers and are initiated into drug use around that time. The goal was to “stop filling the funnel from the top” and focus on prevention and education, she said. The goal was to “educated and empower young people with the facts,” she said.
Advocates tend to agree that a mass media campaign on health, when done with accurate and helpful information, can be an effective part of prevention.
Creating an “aggressive media campaign” on the dangers of drugs and framing it as a disease rather than a moral failing was one of 56 recommendations laid out by the opioid commission the president created, which was led by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
The larger ad campaign to come will be “massive,” Trump vowed as he delivered a speech in October directing his administration to declare the crisis a public health emergency.
The ads are different from the anti-drug messaging delivered to young people during the 1980s and 1990s. In those ads, teens were instructed to “just say no” to drugs and shown videos of an egg frying in a pan as a voice-over said, “This is your brain on drugs.” Studies have shown that the ads were not effective in changing behavior.
The messaging has evolved during the opioid crisis, partly because many opioid addictions begin with a prescription from a doctor for painkillers such as oxycodone or hydrocodone. After patients become hooked, they turn to the drug’s cheaper street counterpart, heroin, which has increasingly been laced with fentanyl, a more potent opioid.
The White House stressed that other measures were underway as well including efforts to cut off illegal drugs, limiting over-prescribing of painkillers and giving people better access to treatment.
- This article has been updated to include how much the government will spend on the ad campaign.
