BACK IN THE EARLY DAYS of the public service announcement, the Do It Now Foundation convinced white shaman Jim Morrison to tape an anti-drug ad for their "Speed Kills" radio campaign. Alice Cooper had already lent his satanic services to the crusade, and Frank Zappa made a splash with an equally ominous spot warning listeners that "In general, this drug will make you just like your mother and father." The foundation had less success, however, with the indefatigably poetic Lizard King:
"Hi, you little assholes out there listening to the radio instead of doing your homework," said the erotic politician, who was more used to preaching a Rimbaudian gospel of systematic sensory distortion than weaning kids off crank. "This is Jim Morrison of the Doors."
Here the self-taught disciple of Kerouac, Nietzsche, Céline, Bosch, and Baudelaire was interrupted. His spunky enthusiasm was dead on target, but the tone was off.
"Hey," the singer said on take two, "how you guys out there doin'? This is your old buddy Jim Morrison. I sing with a group called the Doors. You might have heard of them. We done a few songs, but I never, never did a song on speed. Drunk? Hell yeah!"
This, too, was off the mark, and Mr. Mojo Risin' tried again:
"Hello, this is Jim Morrison. Don't shoot speed. Christ, you guys, smoke pot!"
And again:
"Shooting speed isn't that smart. Shooting speed kills geese. If you shoot a goose full of speed that goose is gonna swim in circles forever."
And again:
"Hello, this is Jim Morrison from the Doors, and I just got one thing to say. Don't shoot speed. Speed kills. Please don't shoot speed. Try downers, yeah downers, barbs, tranqs, reds -- They're much less expensive."
THE RECORDINGS SAY LESS about Morrison's character than about the character of public-service announcements -- a subgenre that never quite managed to reconcile the bearer and the message. To this day, most PSAs lobbed at the no-man's-land between those who score and those who know the score tend to land on the wrong side of the divide.
Take the "Everclear" ad (the top image on the right side of this page). Here the band's frontman, Art Alexakis, talks about his own drug use, but without quite shaking his voice free of the bragging, fuck-all addict's tone that made him a star in the first place. "I'd do any drug on the table," he says "It didn't matter what it was." Art, we discover "threw away fourteen years," but knows the futility of convincing others to do otherwise. "Don't take my word for it," he concludes. "Figure it out for yourself." What we're left to figure out is that fourteen years of drug use, coupled with a band named after a brand of grain alchohol, is a fine way to land yourself on MTV.
"Frying Pan," released a few years ago as part of the same campaign, sends an equally mixed message. A heroin-chic waif wearing lots of mascara (and not a lot of bra) smashes her kitchen apart in a fit that's supposed illustrate what effects snorting (not shooting -- no needles on prime time TV, please!) heroin might have. Namely, snorting heroin might make you look more like that paper-thin Lolita having sexy fits on the nation's TV screens. Nor is the message of "No Thanks" entirely clear: "Mike," the twelve-year-old protagonist, seems to have snuck into Twilo on a Saturday night. There he's propositioned by a pot-smoking samaritan who thinks a toke or two on Mike's part might offset the effects of an atrociously lame haircut. "No thanks, man," Mike tells him cloyingly, "That stuff is illegal." Poor Mike. He should have said the same thing to his barber.
More useful are ads that forgo attitude and aim for honesty. In "O'Connor," TV star Carrol O'Connor, whose son Hugh killed himself while hooked on drugs, delivers a monologue so wrenching it's almost impossible to sit through. In "Drowning," the simple equation of inhalent intoxication and the oxygen deprivation caused by drowning suddenly makes the prospect of sticking your snout in a bag full of airplane glue a lot less enticing.
Also effective are ads that encourage parents to broach the subject frankly with their kids, and those aimed at kids -- young kids -- themselves. Kids, it seems, are too young to care about acting cool for their friends, and parents are too old, so kids and parents together form a bond no crank dealer can sever. This, it turns out, is something more than effective strategy, as far as advertisers are concerned, since the official war on drugs now sees teenagers as expendable assets.
