Advertising / Partnership to End Addiction

The Partnership to End Addiction (known throughout the years as the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the Partnership for a Drug-Free World, the Partnership at DrugFree.org, and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids) is an American organization based in New York that aims to keep kids and teens from doing drugs.

Since their founding in 1985, they have produced many a memorable Public Service Announcement as part of the War on Drugs. Their most famous ad of all is the infamous "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" spot, which compared drug use to frying an egg (meant to represent one's brain).

Most of the PSAs from this organization, which span from its founding in 1985 to 2010, can be found here for your viewing enjoyment, courtesy of HelloImAPizza.

This is your brain on TV Tropes:

• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: A lot of PSAs have this trope as the focus.
• Ambiguous Situation: Whether or not Susie died in "Final Lesson". The line "Susie's parents never taught her that drugs maim; drugs kill. So Susie learned one final lesson on her own" seems to imply such, but the ambulance leaving her house could imply that she is alive but in critical condition.
• And I Must Scream:
  • One rare spot from 1987, "Vegetable", has a young man explaining to the audience how his older brother and a friend named Rick used drugs to celebrate his birthday two years ago. It ended with the friend dying and the brother ending up in a permanent vegetative state.
  • Another ad is a long, static shot of the ceiling of a hospital room with an IV bag in view. An incessant dripping noise is heard throughout the ad. The narrator says, "You think thirty seconds of this is hard to take? Try thirty years," and goes on to explain that sniffing to get high can cause brain damage.
• Appeal to Authority: Frequently demonstrated in the "Nick and Norm" campaign, where Nick repeatedly states that drugs fund terrorism, but refuses to provide any evidence and simply reasserts that it's a fact because he says so.
• Arc Words: "Any questions?", for their "Brain on Drugs" spot and its numerous remakes.
• Armor-Piercing Question: In a 2016 follow-up to "This Is Your Brain on Drugs", a group of teens asks various questions on drugs (ex. "Weed's legal, isn't it?"). The final question is "Mom...Dad...did you ever try drugs?"
  They're going to ask. Be ready.
• Babysitter from Hell: A radio PSA featured a babysitter who gets high and walks out of the house, leaving the screaming baby alone.
• Bait-and-Switch: "Jamie". Throughout the ad, we're made to believe that Jamie is the addict in a meth lab. However, at the end, Jamie is actually revealed to be a little girl living in the apartment above the meth lab.
• Basement-Dweller: In "Nothing Happens", a man smokes weed with his friend and dismisses the idea that weed is dangerous, saying that he's been getting high for fifteen years and nothing happened. Then his mother calls to him from another room asking him if he looked for a job today.
  Marijuana can make nothing happen to you, too.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Played literally in a cartoon PSA showing a wolf passing by a field of sheep ... only for one of them to be eaten by another sheep. The message was that you never know who might be offering your child drugs.
  • In another PSA from the same campaign, a boy who is being bullied at school befriends a classmate that defends him from the bullies - only to later start offering him drugs.
• Circular Reasoning: A literal example; "Circles" shows a man locked in a room saying "I do coke so I can work longer so I can earn more so I can do more coke" and so on and so forth while walking around in a circle before suddenly disappearing.
• Constantly Curious: "El Preguntón" features a father who constantly asks questions about what his children are doing, when, where, why, and with whom.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: The girl in the "Faces" ad has these, especially when they go pale at the end when she dies.
• Date Rape: Implied to happen in one of the PSAs in the "Rewind" campaign.
• The Dead Rise to Advertise: A variation of such and a Bait-and-Switch: the narrator of one commercial suggests that they should have a celebrity endorsement, which they did via a slideshow of various celebrities who died from substance abuse-related issues, including John Belushi and Jim Morrison.
• Drugs Are Bad: Goes without saying that every PSA from the Partnership to End Addiction has this message.
  • One ad titled "Graveyard" features a father talking to his son about drugs. However, at the end, it's revealed that the father is talking to his son's gravestone because he didn't think he'd need to talk about drugs to a thirteen-year-old. The ad ends with the phrase "If you don't teach your kids to say no to drugs, it's as good as saying yes".
  • Another ad with the same slogan as "Graveyard" titled "Final Lesson" has the main character, a girl named Susie, overdose and be taken away from her home in an ambulance because her parents never taught her about drugs.
  • "Faces" has this more in the audio than the visuals; it tells parents that if they don't talk to their kids about drugs, they may become addicts right under their noses, which is visualized as a girl becoming more and more sickly-looking. The narrator describes it as "a problem that won't go away" as the girl's eyes go pale. One version of the ad ends it there, but the second, much more common variant has an offscreen person cover the girl with a sheet, with the narrator adding "Or even worse; one that does", confirming the girl has died.
  • One series of ads implored parents to talk to their teen(s) about prescription drug abuse by showing babies attempting to open bottles of prescription pills (two of which put the bottles in their mouths).
  • The 1996 ad in which actor Carroll O'Connor talks about his son Hugh's own drug addiction and eventual suicide as mentioned under Truth In Television.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: In "Final Lesson", Susie is never actually shown aside from a few photos of her as a child.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: A man is subjected to this fate in the anti-heroin PSA "Needle" via falling onto a giant needle; this is meant to be a metaphor for how heroin addicts who start off by snorting it will eventually use the drug via injecting it into themselves as said by the narrator.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: One PSA titled "My Boy" has a mom explaining how her son is well-behaved and never gets into trouble, and how he stays away from drugs. All while said son is meeting up with a friend for a drug deal in the driveway right next to where she's doing laundry.
• Ironic Nursery Rhyme:
  • Their "Faces" ad has a creepy voice singing a variation of "Happy Birthday" as the addict becomes more and more disheveled and sickly.
  • A quartet of ads about prescription drug abuse featured heavy metal remixes of popular children's songs (these being "Brahm's Lullaby", "Mary Had a Little Lamb", "Pop Goes the Weasel", and "Rock-a-Bye Baby") over footage of babies trying to open bottles of pills.
  • Several of◊ their print ads◊ have nursery rhymes with altered lyrics pertaining to drugs. The "Baa Baa Black Sheep", "ABCs" and "Humpty Dumpty" ads are adapted into a television format.
• No Name Given: Several characters in their ads have this:
  • The girl in "Faces" is not named.
  • The man and his son in "Graveyard" are not named.
  • Susie's parents in "Final Lesson" are not named.
  • The addict running the meth lab and Jamie's mother in "Jamie" are not named.
  • Neither brother in the "Vegetable" ad is named, only their friend Rick.
• Off with His Head!: "Heads" mentions that an Arizona man decapitated his child while high on meth and tossed the severed head onto a busy highway.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Some PSAs focus on real or fictional parents who lost their child to drug addiction as a way of trying to convince parent viewers to talk to their kids about the dangers of illicit drugs and avert the trope.
• Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: In the "Nick and Norm" PSAs, Nick (right way) asserts that the drug trade funds terrorism, while Norm (wrong way) doesn't believe this and thinks that, at worst, it's a small percentage of that money.
• Sequel Escalation: In 1998, they remade their famous "Brain on Drugs" ad with Rachael Leigh Cook. Rather than just cracking open the egg, Cook smashes it with a frying pan and then proceeds to demolish the entire kitchen. This was likely done to show that drugs (specifically, heroin) harm much more than just your brain.
  • An early 2000s remake of "Snake" focused on the harm drugs can do to the environment on a large scale.
• Side Effects Include...: Parodied. "Side Effects" presents ecstasy as an antidepressant, in the vein of other commercials for them, but then takes a predictably dark turn:
  Announcer: Ecstasy is not for everyone. In fact, it’s not for anyone. New studies show that ecstasy is toxic to the body. Side effects may include depression, severe anxiety, hypertension, stroke, seizures, heart attacks, liver damage, kidney or cardiovascular system failure, worried parents, loss of friends, isolation, and emptiness.
• Shout-Out: One spot from the nineties starred the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who coach some kids on what to do if someone offers them drugs; that is, to get out of there and get a teacher (or, as Michelangelo suggests, get a pizza).
• Snake People: "Snake" has a drug dealer transform into a snake person. Also counts as an example of A Dog Named "Dog".
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • "Everybody's Doing It" has a cheery song about heroin juxtaposed with an addict convulsing and vomiting in a dirty bathroom.
  • The "Meth Cleaner Girl" ad from the same campaign also has a cheery song about meth playing while a woman is shown under the influence of that drug doing various strange and harmful things. An alternate version has the song played in a distorted manner instead, subverting the trope.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: "Surgeon" has a poor sap about to go under the knife of a doctor who is high on marijuana.
• Truth in Television: While most of their PSAs show fictional situations, a few are based on real events.
  • One ad from 1990 has actor Jesse Corti tell the audience about a train crash between an Amtrak train and a freight train caused by the engineer of the latter being high on marijuana while on duty, resulting in the deaths of 16 people.
  • Another ad from 2006 consists only of a photo of a couple, and the 911 call the boyfriend made while he and his girlfriend (who were both high on meth) were trapped in their car during a blizzard. The text on the screen says that the couple was found, but it was too late; they had frozen to death.
  • There's also the "Rodney on Heroin" ad from the late 90s in which pre-addiction and post-addiction photos of actor Rodney Harvey are shown by a friend of his, who says "This is my friend, Rodney" and "This is my friend Rodney on heroin", then him switching back and forth between saying "Rodney" and "On heroin" as well as the before and after photos, ending with "That was my friend Rodney" and an In Memoriam card.
  • While "I Learned It From Watching You" is mostly known for its Narm, drug users do often give birth to children with drug-related health problems, especially if drugs are used during pregnancy.
  • A 1996 ad had actor Carroll O'Connor talk about his son Hugh's drug addiction and eventual suicide. The last line is O'Connor telling parents to "get between your kids and drugs any way you can".
  • On a much lighter note, the "Surfing Monkey" ad was inspired by an incident where a friend of the ad's producer purchased $400 worth of merchandise from QVC while high. He had no memory of doing so until the packages arrived.
  • In the 1990s, a PSA featured George "Crackhead Bob" Harvey, who had speech problems as a result of crack use.
  • An award-winning 1995 PSA featured a real interview with Lenny, a heroin addict.
  • Another well-remembered PSA, "Celebrity Endorsement," features photos of numerous musicians and actors who have died from heroin or cocaine overdoses, and the memorable tagline: "In advertising, they say one of the surest ways to get your message across is to put your celebrities in your commercial. We hope they're right."
  • Another PSA from the late 1990s featured an interview with Troy Dendekker, widow of Sublime’s lead singer Bradley Nowell, who died from a heroin overdose, and their son Jakob Nowell, a toddler at the time.
  • Two ads from the organization in the 2000s focus on Danielle C. Heird, who died after taking ecstasy. One focuses on the pathologist as he describes the autopsy done on her, while another focuses on her father, who is in tears as he states that he would have tried to stop her had he known she was going to take ecstasy and that parents aren't supposed to outlive their children.
  • Another ad from the 2000s focuses on an interview of a teenager named Ashley, who started taking ecstasy when she was 13 years old and continued using it for five years afterwards.
• Wham Shot:
  • In the "Graveyard" ad, a sorrowful father is speaking to his 13-year-old son about drugs. While we believe that the boy is sitting just offscreen listening to him, the pan-out reveals that he's actually talking to the boy's grave.
  • "Vegetable" has a young man in a hospital room discussing how his older brother and his best friend used drugs to celebrate the former's birthday two years prior. He then explains how he sometimes views the friend as the "lucky" one since he died immediately after using while the reveal shows how the brother had been in a coma ever since.
  • "Swimming Pool" has a young woman about to jump off a diving board as an announcer also talks about drugs while she's in the process of jumping. The end of the ad shows that, just after she jumped, the pool is completely empty.
• You Taught Me That: In an infamous ad from the late 1980s, a man grills his son about where he learned to take drugs, only to learn that the son learned it from him.

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