The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids recently startled me with a blog post titled, “Why You Shouldn’t Use the Word Addict.” Drug addiction is a disease, the blog explains. People shouldn’t be defined by having an illness, so it’s better to use first-person language and say “someone with diabetes” rather than “diabetic.” The same should go for the word “addict.”

In other words, the ad was saying, we shouldn’t stigmatize people living with addiction by identifying them based on one condition with which they struggle. I was startled by the blog because stigmatizing drugs and drug users is exactly what the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids did for years under its previous banner, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

“This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs.” Sound familiar?

The Partnership is best known for aiming anti-drug advertisements at young people during the 1980s and 1990s. Nowadays, these ads are sources of ironic nostalgia on YouTube, where they are routinely mocked and parodied. However, at the height of the drug war, the ads were mainstays on the airwaves, supported first by generous foundations and later by a billion-dollar partnership with federal authorities.

Thanks to the Partnership and its allies, young people like myself learned that smoking marijuana would deflate you like a balloon, and using drugs was like cracking your skull open and frying your brains on a hot skillet. Short on facts but heavy on scare tactics, these ads warned against becoming a “junkie” or an “addict,” all while portraying drug users as “criminals” and “losers.” This is just the type of stigmatization the Partnership warns against today. 

What changed? For starters, the anti-drug ads and the broader “Just Say No” campaign had no discernable impact on rates of teen drug use, and government funding eventually dried up. Social attitudes have grown more liberal, particularly towards marijuana. But there are much more sinister reasons for the anti-drug movement’s change in tone.