Travelling through the big sky country of Montana in the north-western United States it is hard to believe that anything could be awry. Piebald ponies graze in their pastures, deer munch grass by the side of the road, and people are few and far between. But a series of billboards are disfiguring the views of the Rockies.
In one, a bloodied young man stares arrogantly at the camera. ”Actually, doing meth won’t make it easier to hook up,” reads the slogan. Another shows a gouged back, with the words: ”Scabs, boils and body sores. Then things really go downhill.”
In a third, a close-up of a woman’s mouth showing rotting teeth and scabbed lips smeared with blood, the slogan reads: ”You’ll never worry about lipstick on your teeth again.”
The billboards went up last month, along with TV and radio ads. The Montana Meth Project’s aim is to warn of the dangers of methamphetamine and it is leaving little to chance. The $4,5-million campaign is the biggest in Montana, with ads on primetime TV, in cinemas, on almost every billboard in the state and in rotation on radio stations.
A $4,5-million campaign for a state with a population under one million may seem excessive, but to the man bankrolling it, it is barely sufficient. ”The word ‘drug’ is not incendiary enough. This stuff is unbelievable.” Tom Siebel sold his software company, Siebel Systems, last year for $5,8-billion and has an estimated personal fortune of $1,6-billion.
He heard about the state’s methamphetamine problem from two friends in law enforcement. Montana, like other rural western states, is seeing communities ravaged by methamphetamine use.
Methamphetamine, a potent form of amphetamine, was first synthesised in Japan in 1919. Allied and Axis troops were given meth in World War II, and by the 1950s it was prescribed to American women as a dietary aid, to combat depression and as an energy boost. But after it was criminalised, production moved underground and purity was diminished. Now production is dominated by Mexican drug cartels.
But it was the ease of producing meth that in part prompted its rise in rural areas. Fertiliser, household chemicals and pseudoephedrine, a common nasal decongestant, together with tubing and a gas stove are all that is needed to make meth, which is snorted, smoked or injected. While lawmakers focused on heroin and cocaine, methamphetamine quietly took over the west.
Effective spending
”When you’re thinking about philanthropy you’re thinking about areas where you might accomplish something and have some leverage,” Siebel says. ”A lot of philanthropic acts are akin to boiling the ocean. But I thought, gee, maybe there’s a chance to do something.”
He realised that for relatively little money he could saturate Montana with anti-meth advertising. The results have been impressive, with the campaign raising awareness among 90% of respondents to the project’s own survey.
The approach is familiar in the UK, particularly from the anti-heroin campaigns of the late 80s. Siebel even recruited Tony Kaye, a veteran of British advertising, who now lives in Los Angeles. ”It’s film-making on a microscopic level,” Kaye says of the 30-second commercials. ”The fact that these commercials will be running in primetime will be quite a shock. The American public is not used to seeing this on their TV in a commercial break, although television and real life are full of it.”
The ads have high production values. ”I wish my tyre had blown out that night,” says a female voice as a car speeds across the screen before crashing and rolling. The young bleeding woman is glimpsed through a smashed car window. ”But I didn’t crash,” she continues. ”I drove to that party and did meth for the first time. And now this is my life.” Viewers then see an image of the prematurely aged woman as a meth addict.
Another ad shows a young woman at a party, asking friends if she can have some of what they’re having. ”You want meth?” says a man. ”Here’s your meth. And your meth dealer. And your meth boyfriends. And your meth baby. And don’t forget your meth face.” He holds a mirror up to her now ravaged face.
The ads are powerful. But are they not a little far-fetched, with their promise of bad skin, bad teeth and an imminent inability to perform housework calling to mind not only the anti-heroin campaigns of the 80s but the descent into debauchery promised by the 1936 anti-marijuana classic Reefer Madness.
Carren Clen started taking meth at 17 and within six months had cut her parents out of her life and was prostituting herself to fund her drug habit. ”When I first saw those ads I remember feeling like I was going to throw up, it’s almost like flashbacks,” she says. Now 22, she came off meth when the supply dried up in her part of Montana. She joined a detox programme and now works as a manager in Yellowstone national park.
”I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it,” says Jen Hedges (28). She tried meth when she was 26, old for a first-time user. ”It is very intense,” she says. ”It wakes you up, you’re invincible, cocky, opinionated.” Although she was not instantly hooked — it was three months before her second hit — Hedges was soon using the drug every day. When police found meth in her car, she went to jail, losing her job, her home and custody of her eight-year-old son.
”My teeth are a little bit messed up and I’ll never be able to fix them,” she says. Users frequently suffer from ”methmouth”: the drug dries the mouth causing users to grind their teeth.
For the Montana attorney general, Mike McGrath, the worry is rising crime, child neglect and the prison population. There are no reliable measures of the number of addicts or of the role of meth in crime, but McGrath is clear there is a serious problem. ”We’ve had growing meth problems here for the last 10 to 15 years,” he says. ”We worked very hard to bring awareness of the problem to rural communities but frankly they were in a state of denial. Now, with this campaign, awareness levels are huge.”
Diverted resources
Federal authorities have belatedly started to take an interest: the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which will devote more than $100-million to fighting the drug, has come into force. Several states, including Montana, have banned unregistered sales of pseudoephedrine.
McGrath admits that the focus on meth is diverting resources from other priorities, and critics suggest that the hysteria over the latest US ”epidemic” is ill-judged. After all, what happened to the other epidemics threatening society — the crack craze, PCP, GHB?
What reliable figures there are show that while treatment of meth addicts has gone up, US meth use has, if anything, declined slightly in the past two to three years. This could suggest that existing addicts find it easier to seek treatment, or that the statistics are lagging behind.
”Look,” says Tom Siebel, ”there are drugs and then there is meth. People can live and function and occasionally do marijuana and cocaine without destroying their lives … We’ve all been there. You’re somewhere you shouldn’t be, you’ve had six beers. All we’re saying is, if you’re going to make a bad choice, make some other bad choice.” – Guardian Unlimited Â