The Anti-Drug Abberation

<< A Brief History of Killer Apps

My arm’s still healing from my stupid pinched nerve, so I’m still having someone sub in for me. Today, we have someone who calls themselves Mr. Draper taking over for me, talking about how he first got into this mess through the world of Advertising.

The Anti-Drug Abberation

By Mr. Draper

From the top: none of us use our real names. I especially am not supposed to; despite what Tristan and a few other die-hards want you to think, the Institute isn't a formal organization, but it’s more serious than a hobby. Think of us as a monitoring agency. But a monitoring agency needs capital, and I’m one of the main providers of lucre. Ad money, in this case, and through my job, I have a finger on the pulse of the whole malicious media octopus.

This is a tale from 2006 or so, when I was getting my feet wet in the world of professional ad copy.

#

I’m old enough to remember drinking the D.A.R.E. Kool-Aid back when it was first served in the 80’s, and realized it was bunk after I had my first hit of the Devil’s Lettuce at sixteen-- weed is half the reason I got through college. But me realizing that the biggest anti-drug program in the United States was baseless propaganda didn’t stop me from getting a paycheck from a firm that specialized in anti-drug PSAs, demonizing everything from tobacco to crack to caffeine. I like to call this place Fun Police, Inc.

I got noticed by someone higher up in the firm back in 2004, after I pitched a trio of anti-smoking advertisements that I wrote while smoking three packs a week, themed around how bad it was compared to harder drugs. One was a guy trying to snort cigarettes, advertising that “Nicotine is Ten Times more Addictive than Cocaine”. The second was absolutely disgusting, a photograph of a smoker’s teeth, with the caption reading “Cigarettes are worse for your teeth than Meth”. The third one I wrote got me to quit smoking after I did some research on it-- a lonely guy in a club, apparently trying to inject a cigarette into him while others held a conversation. The slogan? “Heroin addicts have more friends than tobacco smokers”. Read into that what you will.

When it comes to Anti-Drug PSAs, you have to be as blunt and unsubtle as possible, really nail it in that Drugs Are B-A-D Bad, because if the kids viewing it even get a second of critical thinking, they’ll realize that the adderall they take is basically microdosing meth. Blame Reagan, blame Nixon, blame Hearst or Daren the Lion or anyone you want, but the idea that drugs are a bad thing has been baked into American culture for decades, and it’s no less profitable.

Like I said, it was ‘06. I was ready to write ad copy about the harder stuff, but before I or anyone else in my department did that, Fun Police, Inc. wanted to do an exercise to see just what we could do. The staff broke up into teams of two, and drew little pieces of paper out of a hat. The papers had the ‘official’ name of the drug on them, a bunch of street names, and their effects. The catch is that none of these drugs were real, and the effects were really bizarre. One team got a ‘narcotic eyedrop’ called ‘scrundle’ that they had to write copy about, and someone else had to figure out how to make the prospect of smoking horse piss not sound absolutely hilarious.

I got paired up with another guy, name of Luto Frederickson. He was a bit of an oddball, pretty sure he was foreign, always stuttered when he spoke. But he was okay, overall, until this project started; he and I were assigned a drug called Ramaltadone, which was allegedly a prescription drug that was abused by ‘the youth’ (their words, not mine) for its side effects. Intended to treat schizophrenia, Ramaltadone was highly addictive and could actually induce hallucinations in those who didn’t have mental illnesses.

Yes, I know that pharmaceuticals don’t work that way. But the people who wrote the prompt didn’t care. We were a marketing firm, not Pfiezer. We decided to just go with a general ‘prescription drug abuse’ message, but… Luto wanted something more.

“What if,” he asked, “we show them the true horrors of using this drug?”

I just sorta gave him an odd look. “The drug isn’t real. How can we show them the horrors of it?”

And he responded, “How do we show children that dragons are horrifying?” And then he just… set to work sketching something on a sheet of paper, while I started to write some copy up.

I don’t have the original copy, but it went something like this: “Taking drugs without a prescription can be a killer.” And then I wrote, for the image, ‘something like a kid passed out on the floor with pills coming out of his eyes maybe?’. I figured that sounded too horrific, but I showed the concept to Luto, and he just kinda grinned and started sketching away.

By lunch, he had drawn something that resembled what I had in mind pretty closely. It was honestly messed up-- the kid was no more than twelve and he had pills coming not only out of his eyes, but his nose and mouth. For something drawn within a few hours, it was pretty good; not like those photorealistic drawings that take two damn months to make, but a more-than-decent job that you’d expect from an art grad.

The intent was to convey an overdose, but… Luto didn’t seem satisfied. “Doesn’t convey the hallucinations,” he muttered, and then asked, “What’s your favorite color?” We weren’t using colors, just pen and pencil.

“Uh. Purple.”

And then he made a few adjustments to the drawing. He scrawled… something on the shirt the kid was wearing, before he presented the drawing back to me. The shirt was now purple.

I took the paper out of his hand and turned it over, touched it, and even tore a little bit off. The shirt looked, for all the world, like it had been colored in purple with some crude colored pencils, maybe even some crayon mixed in. But he had just scribbled a few lines on it-- lines that I couldn’t see. “What the fuck?”

“Ah! So you can see it. Good. That’ll be the first symptom.” He picked it up and walked to the break room. Then, he clocked out for lunch.

That damn thing was in the break room for the rest of the day, pinned to the corkboard. People tried not to notice it; I think the color weirded them out more than anything. I made some pretty messed-up pitches before, but the drafts were pretty much never in color.

I started getting a headache after I got back from lunch. I was expecting Luto to be there working with me, but… apparently he left to pick up a food order from the lobby of the building, and never came back. This headache started out dull, like the kind you get when you’re in caffeine withdrawal, or dehydrated. I drank some cold coffee and went to work on the draft-- before realizing it was still pinned to the corkboard. My head hurt, but I could at least get a fresh cup while I was getting the draft.

I stopped at the door. The draft wasn’t on the bulletin board. Well, it was, but it was completely different. We didn’t have access to photo-editing stuff in the office, we were literally just there to write ad pitches and do a few sketches. So what the hell was a photograph of a kid with pills coming out of his eyes and mouth doing on the bulletin board, looking like it had just been ripped straight out of a magazine?

I pulled it off the board and showed it to one of the other copywriters; we’ll call her Dee. Dee looked between me and it, confused. She asked if it was one of my ads that got printed. I told her no, that I had drafted it earlier that day, and it now looked like that. I asked her to hold the paper; it didn’t feel like the semi-glossy sheets you get in most magazines. It felt like the same drafting paper we used.

My boss, let’s call him Jay, came over and wondered what the hell I was doing away from my station. Jay, it should be noted, wore glasses; somehow he was the only guy in the office to do so. He looked at the thing we were holding mid-sentence, and backed away from it as if we were Jeffery Dahmer admiring one of his severed heads.

“You okay, Jay?” I asked.

“What the hell is that?” He took off his glasses and rubbed his face, tears in his eyes. “Get it-- get it away from me!”

“Jay, calm down, it’s--” I stopped. Dee was pulling out her reading glasses to see what was wrong. I put my hand on her arm and shook my head. Jay just curled up on the ground.

A few other people came to see what all the hubbub was about. After a while, we just all stood there, transfixed on the ad. I don’t know what everyone else saw, we never talked about it after. But as for me…

The stream of pills coming out of the kid’s face started flowing out of the picture, and onto the floor. I felt the gel capsules gather around my feet, almost slipping on them a few times. It was ever enough to go past my ankles, but I was never on steady footing. It was tolerable, like standing in the middle of a creek without any of the wetness. The whole time, I didn’t question it.

#

I’ve done drugs before, like I’ve said. I honestly don’t think you can write ad copy for anti-drug stuff without trying at least some of the softer stuff like weed or shrooms. The hardest thing I tried was acid.

There are all sorts of cartoonish portrayals of what an acid trip is. You don’t see people’s heads turn into walruses, or see your toenails turn into gnomes, or literal pink elephants, or some guy holding a pie that’s on fire telling you the name of your band is stupid and you should change it.

It’s an altered state of reality, but by and large, it’s still that: reality. You’ll see people’s faces twist into horrible, monstrous expressions, or see the walls move up and down, see the sky turn bizarre colors. But there’s more than the sights; the sounds are intense, too. There’s a reason a lot of the best music of the 60’s was written while on acid. If I’d thought to write down what I heard, and if I could sing worth a damn, I’d have been a rockstar by the time I was twenty-five.

There’s some tactile stuff, one time I thought the couch I was on was trying to eat me because it was burning my skin. The point is, acid trips are weird, but part of you knows that this isn’t real.

With the vision I was having… I didn’t get that. It felt too real, too perfect. I felt like I was staring at some divine-- or else unholy-- work of art that was making me see these visions. And the whole time, I felt like I was being drained of my desires. The company I worked at never did drug tests, so I did a little reefer every now and again. As I was viewing that, I never wanted to do weed again. Hell, I never wanted to take so much as cold medicine again.

Then, there was a shrieking noise straight out of hell itself, and lights flashing all over. Some of us fell on our ass, some of us started crying, and some of us stumbled around, blinded by the light. After a moment, we realized what it was-- the fire alarm.

We got out of there as quick as we could. On our way down the stairwell, someone was going up-- none of us tried to stop them, we were too busy trying to get away from that damn thing on the desk. Everyone got outside okay, but we were all very, very confused.

We’d all gathered around the ad at about 2:00 PM or so. But now? Now it was dark outside. My watch read around 8:00 PM. We’d lost six hours, staring at some weirdo magic advertisement.

Naturally, everything that happened was attributed to a gas leak. We were told to go home and that we’d be compensated for the time we were supposed to work until the issue was fixed. So, I went to the garage where my car was… and I found someone waiting there for me.

They were a lot younger than me, maybe in college. She had a pair of sunglasses on, and the lenses of the glasses had red X’s painted on them, inside a circle, looking like some crosshairs or something. She was blonde, a bit chubby, and wore entirely black clothes. Underneath her right arm was a brown art folio. I’d never seen her before-- and then I realized she'd been the one to push past me to go upstairs.

“Were you paired with Luto Fredrickson?” She asked.

“What?”

She repeated the question.

“No, I heard you, but… why do you care?”

“Mr. Frederickson has gone by several names over the years-- Lewis Newton, Lincoln Nilson, Ludo Neptune, to name a few. We’ve been trying to track him down, but it looks like we’ve lost him again.”

“You a cop? Too young to be a cop.”

She just smiled at me. “I’m a concerned party.” She held up the folio. “We managed to contain his work. Can you describe to me what you saw?”

I don’t know why, but I told her. She pulled out a composition book with a black and white cover and started writing what I said down. By the end of it, I just… kind of started to panic as I described the feeling of the pills around my legs.

“All right.” She closed her book. “I suggest you go home, rest, and maybe try to move past this incident.”

As she walked away, I asked: “What if I don’t wanna?”

She turned around, genuine confusion on her face. She took off her sunglasses.

“Look. You said that Luto or Ludo or whoever, he’s done this before? Somehow? I don’t know what kind of weird voodoo shit there was up there, but I don’t think this is an isolated incident. What else has happened with this?”

She put away her sunglasses. “You’re going down a pretty deep rabbit hole here. Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed. “Yeah, I’m sure. If there’s more stuff like this out there, I want to make sure it doesn’t reach the public eye.”

She just kind of smiled at me, and reached into the folio, handing me a Polaroid photo. It showed the entire staff standing over Dee’s desk, looking at the ad. I couldn’t see any of it from here, but what I did see was Jay, on the floor-- or rather, halfway in the floor. Something that looked like TV static was dragging him through the carpet. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Jay on the way out.

“When did you take this?” I asked. I hadn’t seen her there.

“About twenty minutes after you evacuated the building.” As if it explained her bonkers sentence, she held up an old Polaroid camera that was at her side. “They’ve weaponized the world’s media. We found a way to strike back.”

After that, we went out for drinks, and she gave me the sales pitch. I got invited to their IRC thing, which eventually became their Telegram. Been part of the group ever since.

#

Whatever Luto did, it never stuck for me. I still do weed every now and again. Tried some of the harder stuff after this, but it wrecked my teeth.

We never saw Jay again. In light of all the weird shit that happened with the ‘gas leak’, the company cut back on employees. I managed to stick around. Since then, I've taken over the company,, and we've moved away from anti-drug stuff, especially since everyone and their godmother is pushing for the legalization of weed now. Good.

I’ve run into a few other things over the years. A few completely normal products have had just… goddamn bizarre ads made for them. Just to name a few: several implied cannibalism ads for fast food places, a beer commercial where they suggest garnishing it with a severed finger, and a movie trailer where every character is somehow Elijah Wood. Not played by Elijah Wood, just… Elijah Wood, looking terrified of the aliens around him.

Luto/Ludo/Whoever the Hell he was keeps popping up. Sometimes he’s a musician, sometimes an artist, sometimes a writer. But his works are all messed up. One of our guys in London is still serving a prison sentence for destroying one of his works before it went up at the Tate.

I don’t know much beyond that. I’m the ad guy, and the backer. Other people have the job of finding and stopping this weirdo.

 

Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013)  >>