I’ve had a sudden flood of hits on a post about the legal highs campaign, Crazy Chemist. What’s going on? Google quickly found this Daily Mail story: Anger at ‘appalling’ Government legal high campaign.
It turns out that the campaign has cause some outrage – among chemists. It’s a new academic year, and the campaign is running in universities across the UK. Trouble is, real-life lab types don’t seem to like it at all. See for example the BBC and the Telegraph. In a press release last week, the Royal Society of Chemists says
“This is a lazy stereotype of the chemist as unhinged scientist and it is totally irresponsible.”
I have to admit, at no point did we discuss the impact of this work on the public image of chemistry. Come on – it’s clearly a fictional character. We just wanted to create a campaign that would cut though with our message – just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s safe.
This point is well made in a robust justification of the campaign from James Brokenshire, Minister for Crime Prevention. The government has halved communications spend – but highly targeted campaigns with strong messaging are clearly still worth running.
Filed under: Advertising, Drugs, FRANK, Politics, Uncategorized | Tags: Advertising, COI, effectiveness, FRANK, Mother, Politics
By the way, there’s an election on – and both parties will spend heavily on their campaigns: in 2005, they each spent just short of £18 million, and this time the Tories are already on their second national outdoor advertising campaign.
Nice to see they believe in the power of communications. So why are both parties pledging to cut government advertising budgets? The Tories will cut 40%, whilst Labour say they’ll cut 25% in two years time. Here are some of the lines being trotted out:
“Government is the UK’s biggest advertiser”
Shock horror: government ad spend was £207.9 million in 2009 overtaking P&G as the UK’s biggest advertiser. And why not? P&G spent £155 million in 2009, persuading us to buy Pampers instead of Huggies. Government communications deals with public health, climate change, drink-driving, etc. Wouldn’t we expect government to spend at least as much as P&G?
“We need to get tough on government waste”
Cutting communications budgets fits into the whole “finding efficiencies” narrative. This is massively short-sighted: spending on communications should be able to save the government money:
- The NHS spends £1.7 billion each year treating smoking-related conditions. Doesn’t it make sense to discourage people from smoking? The government spends on average $8 million a year on anti-smoking ads (with a 2008 burst of £28 million). Prevention before cure – does this sound like waste, or common sense?
- The NHS spends around £1.5 billion each year treating conditioned linked to obesity. The government is spending £75 million over three years on anti-obesity advertising. Sounds sensible to me./li>
“We need to reduce the deficit”
The Tories’s 40% cut would save around £80 million. This barely covers a few hours of the national deficit (currently running at £500 million a day). To put it in perspective, the money government would save covers the cost of widening a mile and a half of the M6 (costing £56 million a mile).
“We need spending cuts to boost the economy”
This is obviously the Tory philosophy – but there’s evidence that government advertising has a benefit to the economy.
- The Home Office spent £28.4 million over four years on its Vehicle Crime campaign, and econometric modeling shows this saved just over £590 million in the cost of crime (source: IPA effectiveness paper).
- Our own work for FRANK uses highly targeted communications to heavy drug users, getting them into treatment before they become problem drug users – saving up to £100,000 for each individual (the healthcare cost of a long term heroine user) as well as preventing broader social and economic harm.
Of course, it’s a few easy headlines: cracking down on waste, spin, nanny-state, etc. The Daily Mail love it, with a steady stream of stories like Celebrities paid £325,000 to appear in government advertising. The reality is, communications work – they’re an important policy tool, and the politicians know it.
Image from Adbusters
Filed under: Drugs, FRANK, Mother, Social Media, Uncategorized, Youth | Tags: cocaine, Drugs, FRANK, legal highs, mephedrone, Social Media, Youth
We’re now almost at 190,000 fans on Pablo’s Facebook page, part of the FRANK campaign. It’s become a real community, and since the beginning one of the main topics has been mephedrone – or meph, or MCAT, or cat piss, or bubble, or plant fertilizer, or whatever you want to call it.
Mephedrone has been in the news following two deaths this week. It’s currently one of a number of legal drugs, which has prompted a predictable furore (“The Death Drug We Can’t Police“, etc). Mandelson promised to look into it “very speedily” (perhaps not his finest choice of adverb).
We’ve been exploring communications around the “legal highs”, and developed the Crazy Chemist campaign (above), which ran in clubs last year. There are new chemicals being developed/synthesized/distributed all the time – it’s cat and mouse. We needed a proposition that can cover all of them. We found some crazy people out there pushing the envelope. This post from one of the mephedrone pioneers, a chemist calling himself Kinetic:
i’ve been bored over the last couple of days and had a few fun reagents lying around, so i thought i’d try and make some 1-(4-methylphenyl)-2-methylaminopropanone hydrochloride, or 4-methylmethcathinone. [...] I was a bit scared about what snorting 50mg might do, but since I’ve been almost constantly abusing the (badly synthesised) 1-phenyl-2-methylaminobutan-1-one, 50mg didn’t do too much. I thought I’d wasted my time until I snorted another 100mg about 30 minutes later, and then it hit me. Intense rushes all over, lasting for well over 30 minutes.
That was in 2004. Legal highs like mephedrone find their way into the clubs, and then out into the mainstream. In 2008, mephedrone didn’t even have a Wikipedia page – now it’s easily to order online. A Google trends search shows the steady growth of interest in mephedrone over the last 12 months:
We did some qualitative work with users, and found the growth of legal highs is part of a bigger picture: “escapism is back”, as our researcher Steve Lacey puts it. Drug use is always part of a bigger drug culture, and Steve thinks that an impulse to get “out of it” is a growing response to the recession. Platform magazine agrees:
Down with shiny women, washing and cocaine, up with bad tattoos and stealing tranquilizers from pony club. Economy drug experimentation is reaching a new socially acceptable high.
Maybe this is why the current national panic over mephedrone isn’t focused on the cities, but in deprived rural areas, as reported in the latest Druglink. For example, in Teesdale, mephedrone use was triggered by a police crackdown on local cocaine dealers, as sgt Michael Urwin explains:
From what we can gather, it started from one lad in Cockfield watching a BBC3 documentary about legal highs. He’s gone on the internet and bought some mephedrone. Then he bought in bulk, sold to his mates in the village and from there it traveled to the neighbouring village of Evenwood, then onto the towns of Barnard Castle, Bishop Auckland and eventually Darlington. I think it’s a case of an enterprising, if that’s the right word, teenager who thought ‘how can I get round this lack of cocaine’.
So, it’s the BBC’s fault. This is the risk that communications face: talk to much about it and you stimulate demand. That’s why Crazy Chemist was targeting clubs environments. But we may be seeing a perfect storm of drug use: a growing desire for escapism; cheap and easy access online; police are turning the screws on cocaine and ecstasy supply, and prices are rising. Banning mephedrone may (or may not) solve the government’s mephedrone problem, but you can bet the next batch of legal highs are ready and waiting.
Our Facebook page for Pablo the Drug Mule Dog now has over 135,000 fans – and it’s still growing. It’s an extension of the TV campaign, which shows Pablo’s journey through the darker side of cocaine use. Our Facebook page simply continues this journey. Pablo meets all sorts of people involved in the world of coke: a DJ, a bouncer, a doctor, the mother of an addict, etc – asking them all, “what’s the big deal about coke?”.
It’s been great to watch a community form around this page – here’s what we’ve learnt so far:
1. IT’S PLAY
We’ve created a safe environment where kids feel OK to discuss drugs and ask stupid questions without risk of embarrassment.
2. IT’S COMMUNITY
It’s been funny and sometimes quite moving to read some of the stories people are sharing, and their response to each other – eager to offer advice and encouragement.
3. IT’S SELF-REGULATING
At first we had a lot of “drugs are cool and should be legal’ comments. We resisted moderating these, and it’s been great to watch the community become self-moderating.
4. IT’S CONVERSATION
Pablo’s quest provide a good story, and the films are like an “alibi” for being on Facebook – but the main draw for kids is the social, not content – it’s all about conversation: with Pablo, with each other. Pablo keeps the conversation going.
FRANK is the most trusted source of drugs information for young people – more than your teachers, your mum, or even your friends. But FRANK was invented in 2003, and the world kids live in has changed just a bit since then. We’re learning loads from this activity about how to keep building trust with kids in the world they live in now.
Filed under: Alcohol, Drugs, Economics, Education, Youth | Tags: Alcohol, digital, digital natives, Drugs, Education, lost generation, RSA, Youth, YouTube
A few of us from Mother went to the Lost Generation talk at the RSA last week, where the economist David Blanchflower warned of the “lull before the storm” in youth unemployment. Currently it’s 1 in 5, and set to rise. This is a big deal, he says: it could leave permanent social and economic damage on an entire generation.
Interesting to see the allergic reaction from Ruby Pseudo to the language of “lost generations”. Here she is, speaking up:
We have the tools; the abilities; the knowledge, to succeed in an increasingly digital world – we are fast thinking, forward thinking, adept and mobile. We are the net generation and, by that, the most powerful generation ever [and we’re the ones that are in trouble?!]
Ruby’s point is that the world of work needs to adapt to a generation with a different set of skills. It’s not just a macro economics question of job creation: as Miles Templeman of the Institute of Directors put it in the discussion after the talk, the old jobs are going, and they’re not coming back. The challenge is to find new ways of working, more flexible and engaging modes of employment.
All this sounds good, but something’s not right. Last week we spent a couple of hours talking to 16 year olds from local Hackney schools. None of them had a clue (or much interest) in what happens when school finishes – let alone any ideas about the future. These are the kids that the President of the National Union of Students Wes Streeting focused on during the talk – the ones at risk of real, lasting social exclusion, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.
When we asked them what would be their ideal job, there was a pretty clear answer: testing computer games. It made me think of Steve Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You: the technology/media/culture environment young people are growing up in is teaching them to new cognitive skills – skills which aren’t being engaged by the world of work.
If the way that young peoples minds work is changing, shouldn’t the world of school change too? Instead, we have an epidemic of Ritalin prescription in this country – in some towns, as many as one in seven children under 16 are prescribed Ritalin (source). This is the lost generation: thousands of young people being pathologised for the convenience of doctors, teachers and parents.
It’s the good old Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants generation gap. It’s not just the world of work that needs to change, the world of learning does too. As the US group Partnership for 21st Century Skills puts it, “today’s education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how they learn”.
Before we start getting all “Learning 2.0″, let’s get some perspective. We asked the 16 year olds we met what they’re looking at on YouTube at the moment: as one of them said, “I just type in FUNNY SHIT and see what happens”. We thought we’d entertain ourselves and our clients by running together a montage of the clips they talked about…. LYAO!
“Dole Street” image grabbed from David Blanchflower’s RSA Presentation. Any YouTube copyright infringements unintentional!
