disinformation | the ad campaign to wash your brain

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the ad campaign to wash your brain
by Preston Peet (ptpeet@cs.com) - January 22, 2001

The Clinton Administration and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) are conducting a war on your mind and the way you think. By using 'social marketing' tactics, "a strategic, behavior change approach," they are aiming to program the population to think the way they desire it to. But evidence suggests that it may not be what you think they would like you to think.

If the Media Campaign wasn't so scary and pervasive, it would be funny. Frisbees printed with anti-drug messages aren't going to change the way I think, nor anyone I know, but that is one of the ways that the ONDCP is getting their anti-drug message across to Joe and Jane Public. Since 1998 their aim has been to inundate the community with their version of reality: to alter the way that the public perceives the world around them, taking over from the Partnership for a Drug Free America's (PDFA) infamous long-running anti-drug campaign.

The current ONDCP Media Campaign (they capitalize the title Media Campaign), is the biggest ever launched by the US Government. Over a 5 year period, the ONDCP will spend an unprecedented nearly US$1 Billion to alter and re-program the way we think about drugs.

The House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources held a hearing (October 14, 1999), on the effectiveness of this campaign, and on how exactly the funding is being spent. "This is an unprecedented amount of money," according to an insider source, "and there is the feeling that drug use is increasing, even after part of the massive spending that has already been done."

The slick Media Campaign is being engineered by Fleishman-Hillard, "recognized by the Thomas L. Harris Client Survey as the best public relations office in Washington DC." They have "demonstrated success at managing and coordinating a wide variety of major national communications programs, including education programs designed to change behavior," according to the testimony of Harry Frazier, Senior vice-president of F-H, before the Subcommittee. "The media campaign is structured to complement advertising with strategic communications to effectively influence target audiences," which include "specific minority and ethnic communities." This has "emerged as the method behavior change experts prefer for effective public education . . . The communications component delivers Campaign messages through radio and television, print media, the Internet, faith communities, health professionals, community coalitions, schools, parents, coaches, and organized sports."

Dr. S. Shyam Sundar, director of Media Research Laboratory, the College of Communications, Pennsylvania State University, testified to the results of a study made by Carson Wagner under his supervision for a Masters Thesis in the Spring of 1998. They noticed that despite the success of Public Service Announcements to reach their target audiences since 1987 (when PDFA first got started), there was simultaneously an increase in drug use among the nation's youth. They wondered if somehow the anti-drug PSAs were triggering drug abuse, rather than preventing it, hypothesizing that the PSAs were "priming viewers to think about drugs, bringing to mind drug-related thoughts stored previously, and leading them to cognitively exaggerate the prevalence of drug use in society." In other words, a double-bind message: There's drugs all around you kid, everyone is doing them, but don't you too, because they are BAD. Just Say NO, even though everyone else seems to be doing the opposite.

One of Sundar's conclusions during his testimony is harrowing: "such a perception of exaggerated norm would then lead to a perceived gap in information, (i.e. others seem to know more about drugs than me), followed by a drive to narrow this gap by gaining personal experimental knowledge, thereby resulting in an expression of curiosity about experimenting with drugs."

Fleishman-Hillard International
This is the outfit now working to flood the target populations with the anti-drug propaganda and hysteria that contribute so greatly to the problem. They have 6 subcontractors working with them, specifically aiming their propaganda at minority neighborhoods, and population niches. An outcome that is so incredibly like the films 1984 and Brazil.

Social Marketing.com
Here is a definition of Social Marketing right from the SM homepage. This will give you an idea of what the ONDCP doing with the huge 'non-advertising' blitz, as the folks from F-H like to put it. This is nothing more than a mind control experiment, to program the minds of the youth in America with the Government's propaganda. They are "selling Ideas, attitudes, and behaviors."

ONDCP/PF DA Accused of Propaganda and Influence Peddling
The Media Awareness Project has put up a site with a number of links to articles on this subject, to help the public get a good look at what the Office of National Drug Control Policy has been up to, illegally and unethically. A must read!

Drug Office Ad Deal Included Newspapers
The US ONDCP has been offering financial benefits to around 250 newspapers around the USA for running with the anti-drug hysteria aimed at assisting prison industry, oops, I mean concerned parent groups, fight the Drug War.

ONDCP/PDFA Accused of Propaganda and Influence Peddling
Here is the MAP site's group of links to different articles on the ONDCP brainwash scam in the US media. All the US media. This is a must-view site!

The Drug War Gravy Train
In this Salon magazine article (March 31, 2000), Dan Forbes does it again, detailing huge amounts of government propaganda and brainwashing in popular magazines, specifically targeting the currently illicit drugs, and specifically ignoring tobacco and alcohol. Neat trick: subsidize the two biggest killers around, and then through a media saturation campaign, prime kids to use the illicit stuff too! This keeps the Military/Industrial/Law enforcement complex in power, and gives it's current form an excuse for continued existence.

National Association of State Alcohol/Drug Abuse Directors
These are some of the 'partners' in the Media Campaign, and definitely one of the groups raking in the money from those people who are convinced that they have a problem with marijuana, or are mandated into treatment to avoid jail time, or instead of jail time. Treatment is definitely better than being locked up, though it should never get to that choice.

The ONDCP Media Campaign Home-page
Here it is, the scoop right from the horse's mouth. Looking at this site reminds me of a visit to the PTA somewhere, where all they can think about is drugs. Print ads, posters, TV slots, with catchy little ditties and slogans decrying the evils of drugs.

Networks Prodded to Air Anti-Drug Messages
Rich Hamilton is quoted as saying, "I'm fairly amazed that there has been any concern expressed about this," clearly not getting the point that the government is illegally enabling networks to re-sell ad space, while letting the government add subliminal messages nnd covert psychological warfare techniques, targetted on its own populace. Gee, concern? Outrage and fury should be more like it!

Drug Cookies
In this Salon magazine article (June 23, 2000) by Daryl Lindsey, that freedom-hating, anti-American outfit supposedly working for the White House, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is at it again. They are using "cookies" programs, tracking devices that drop into your computer when you visit the ONDCP's marijuana-lies page, Freevibe.com. Although President Clinton helped passed a law, the Children's Online Privacy Act (1998), supposed to protect children from this type of technology and invasion of privacy, the US Government is exempt. It is nice to see that "but some of the very people who helped pass that legislation think it's hypocritical for the government to use software technology that is often associated with surreptitious collection of personal data from Internet users, even if it is only tracking users anonymously."

Prime Time Propaganda
This Salon magazine article (January 13, 2000) reveals that the US government has been involved in payola. The US government breaks the law telling its citizens not to break the law. Go figure. How do we learn the truth about anything, if this is what we get when we ask for truth?

Drug Office Will End Scrutiny of TV Scripts
Now that it has been made public by a mainstream paper (that had its own shady deals going with the ONDCP), the White House Drug Warriors are saying they will stop the surreptitious 'mind control' techniques they were employing by twigging TV scripts. Mr. George Orwell would be proud.

White House Drug Office Tracks Computer Visitors
This Scripps Howard News Service (June 20, 2000) report by Lance Gay illustrates clearly the complete disregard for traditional American values of the men and women running the Prohibitionist War Against Some Drugs. Now it comes to light that if one visits the ONDCP anti-drug site, a "cookie" drops into the computer, and then tracks the visitor every where they go on the Internet. Why?

U.S. Also Uses America Online And Comics To Push Its Anti-Drug Messages
Here the US is exposed in using the internet giant America Online (AOL), as well as Marvel Comics to help brainwash the youth of today into accepting the repression of today, and tomorrow. Shades of 'Hitler Youth' are being cast over the world. By the US Government, self-professed leaders of the "free world." Don't laugh: it isn't funny.

The Nationalisation of the Mass Spectator in Early German Film
A look at how the Germans tried to control their population, create a 'popular mind,' through psychological manipulation, and bend the thinking of the people to the way of their leaders, through film. Quite an interesting article.

A Comprehensive List of US Government Mind Control Programs
This is a piece on various projects of the US Gov. using electronic, electromagnetic, and other forms of high-tech brain manipulations on the US populace. I never know what to think of this type of info, as it seems so often just seem a bit too fantastic. Nonetheless, the info is here to check out, and to make up your own mind about.

Electromagnetic Mind Control Concepts
Another site dealing with electromagnetic mind and behavior control. There is even a place here to get protective devices to protect oneself from electromagnetic attacks. Use your own judgment here, please.

A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication
Third edition of the textbook by Richard J. Harris, Kansas State University. Looks at mass communication with an emphasis on how it effects thoughts and behaviors. An order form, and brief review. So if you want to buy a book, great site, otherwise, don't bother.

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