When the Bush Administration talks about a war on drugs and the Christian evangelical movement mounts television campaigns warning of the devastation that drugs can cause to family life, American drug companies can rest easy: the war against drugs does not extend to prescription drugs.

A couple of weeks ago, John Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy launched a television advertising campaign aimed at warning Americans that there are people operating drug laboratories where they "cook" methamphetamines from cold medicines and household chemicals. Given what crack did to American cities, it is no bad thing that there are campaigns to warn people off methamphetamines.

Whether these campaigns are effective is another matter. The crack epidemic ended not because of anti-drug campaigns, stiffer jail sentences or zero tolerance policing but becausemost of the crack dealers and users ended up dead or in jail.

Americans, especially conservative Americans, hate drugs and drug use, especially drugs like marijuana and cocaine which they associate with degenerate liberals and Hollywood types out to destroy family values.

But these same Americans live in what can only be called a drug-addled culture. In America, attitudes to drugs and drug use are contradictory and somewhere in that contradiction there are competing forces at work: freedom versus community responsibility, the power of large corporations, the influence of lobbyists and the American belief that all problems have solutions, happiness is a natural right and sadness an illness.

There is no control of drug prices - no equivalent of Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

The Bush Administration's Medicare drug scheme is designed to offer Americans over 65 relief from paying crippling prices for prescription drugs. Estimated to cost over $US700 billion ($932.8 billion) in the next decade, there is no provision to regulate drug prices which means there is essentially no way of knowing how much the scheme will cost as drug prices rise. This sounds like madness and it is. It reflects the power of the drug companies and their ability to squash any suggestion that government should negotiate drug prices which would set some limits to tax-payer funded schemes like medicare.

There's more madness. Drug companies in America spend $US3 billion a year on advertising - a threefold rise in a decade.

The drug companies argue that this is not designed to encourage people to take drugs, but that it's a way of educating the public about what drugs can and cannot offer and that the ads encourage responsible drug use. And if that's not convincing, drug company lobbyists will argue that drug advertising is a free speech issue and that such advertising is protected by the US constitution. Really.

It is not unusual to have an ad for one of the fast-food chains followed by an one for some drug or other that controls appetite or lowers cholesterol or controls heartburn.

There are signs some Americans are turning a deaf ear to drug advertising. The New York Times reported recently that despite a $US400 million advertising campaign, sales of impotence drugs, including Viagra are falling. Sales of anti-depressants are also down, which may be a sign there are limits to what drug advertising can do.

But don't bet on it. Given the power of the drug companies and the drug-based American pursuit of health and happiness, America's newspapers and radio stations and television networks are unlikely to be too worried that one of their major sources of advertising revenue is about to dry up.

Michael Gawenda is a former editor and editor-in-chief of The Age, and a former editor of TIME South Pacific. He spent the first two decades of his 33-year career in journalism as a reporter. After more than a decade in the editor's chair, he has now returned to his first love. Gawenda said reporting gave him everything he hoped it would - access to interesting people, travel, the ability to reach readers and have a dialogue with them, and the chance to be an eyewitness to important events. He said when TIME asked him to edit the local edition of the magazine, he was dumbfounded. He enjoyed it, but missed the freedom of reporting. Gawenda entertained the idea of becoming a senior editor for TIME and moving permanently to New York, but in the end he wanted to be an Australian journalist working for Australian papers.

Copyright © 2005. The Sydney Morning Herald.

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