The cornerstone of the Montana Meth Project is a series of hard-hitting ads showing the effects of meth use.
A recently published study has found that in eight states where the Meth Project anti-methamphetamine advertising campaign has been used, there is little evidence that the campaigns had any effect on meth use among high school students.
The study did find, however, that there was “some evidence” that the Meth Project may have decreased meth use among white high school students.
The paper was written by D. Mark Anderson, an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics at Montana State University Bozeman, and David Elsea, who studied under Anderson and is now in his first year of doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
It has been accepted for publication by Health Economics, a monthly journal, and was published online by the journal on Oct. 7. The full article is available here. Anderson said the paper probably won’t be published in the journal itself until late in 2015.
Four years ago, Anderson had a similar paper published in the Journal of Health Economics, in which he concluded that the Montana Meth Project, based on a study of some of the same data used by the project, had effects on meth use that were “statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
He says in the introduction to his recent paper that he undertook a new study to see whether the results of the first study would hold true in seven other states that adopted the Meth Project “because of the apparent success of Montana’s campaign.”
The new findings “were very much consistent with what I found the first time,” Anderson said in a telephone interview.
For both studies, he looked at results of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted nationwide every two years by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as similar surveys conducted by individual states. Of those states that do conduct the survey, some do it annually and some every two years. Montana, like the CDC, conducts the YRBS every two years, in odd years.
Data for 2013 were not yet available when Anderson and Elsea conducted their study, which is why their paper looked at data for 1999 through 2011. In the earlier study, Anderson used national YRBS data through 2007and Montana YRBS data through 2009.
Since the founding of the Montana Meth Project by software billionaire Tom Siebel in 2005, the Meth Project has been adopted by Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois and Wyoming.
The key finding of the new study was that, “after accounting for pre-existing downward trends in meth use, we find little evidence of a relationship between the Meth Project and meth use in the full sample,” meaning in all eight states that adopted the campaign.
However, they continue, “If anything, the decrease in meth use appears to have slowed among adopting states after 2005, the inaugural year of the Meth Project in Montana.”
Requests for comment from Amy Rue, director of the Montana Meth Project, and from a media contact in Pennsylvania listed on the Montana Meth Project website, went unanswered.
The website itself, though, does make several claims of success for the Montana Meth Project, including the most widely touted claim, that teen meth use in Montana has declined by 63 percent since 2005.
The citation for that claim is the 2009 YRBS, conducted by the Montana Office of Public Instruction. Last Best News could not find that survey, but the 2013 survey does incorporate 2009 data, and shows that the number of teens who reported ever having tried meth fell from 8.3 percent in 2005 to 3.1 percent in 2009.
As Anderson and Elsea point out, however, that number was swiftly declining even before the advent of the Montana Meth Project—from 13.5 percent in 1999 to 12.6 percent in 2001, and then to 9.3 percent in 2003. In other words, meth use dropped 4.2 percentage points from 1999 to 2003, two years before the Meth Project began, and then dropped 5.2 percentage points during the first four years of the project.
The 2013 state YRBS also shows that the use rate remained at 3.1 percent in 2011, then rose slightly, to 3.6 percent, in 2013.
The picture is made even muddier if you use the Montana Meth Project’s own findings. There is a link on its website to “Montana Meth: Use & Attitudes Survey 2008,” conducted for the project by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media, of New York City.
That survey touts the project’s success for two pages, noting upward trends in social disapproval of meth and in the frequency of parental discussions, as well as in awareness of the Montana Meth Project.
Under “Usage and Availability,” however, there is this statement: “Usage appears to be neither higher nor lower than in past surveys. Three percent of teens admit to having tried meth, a number that has remained essentially stable since 2005.”
Anderson, a native of Lewistown, said he undertook the first study when he was a doctoral student in economics at the University of Washington. On a trip back to Montana in 2009, he read a newspaper article about the apparent success of the anti-meth campaign.
He thought it would make an interesting research topic, since the Montana Meth Project’s claims had not been rigorously studied before. If the claims held up, he said, it would have had important implications for public health, since the Montana Meth Project’s annual operating budget back then was $2.5 million.
That was a pittance compared to the millions spent on interdiction and other criminal-justice solutions like raiding meth labs and arresting and prosecuting meth dealers. Based on what he read of the Meth Project, Anderson said, it seemed “like a really, really successful public health campaign.”
When his findings showed that the effects of meth usage among teens—the main target of the campaign—were negligible, he said, he thought the information could be used by the Meth Project to refine its methods and operations.
But no one from the Montana Meth Project, and no one on the project’s board of directors, ever spoke with him, he said. The only public response was in news articles, where his findings were basically brushed off. He won’t be waiting for a call this time.
“I have no delusions at this point that they would have any interest in talking to me about the results of my new paper,” he said.
Anderson said the Journal of Health Economics, which published his first paper on the Montana Meth Project, is the most prestigious journal of its kind in the United States. He submitted his follow-up paper to that journal, he said, but the editors felt it did not add enough new material to the original study.
Anderson was a bit disappointed because he thought the findings were much more important when applied to eight states, since the results for Montana alone may have been skewed by unknown factors peculiar to the state.
“I thought it was a pretty compelling extension,” he said of the new study.
At any rate, he said, he was happy to have it accepted by Health Economics, the No. 2-ranking journal of its kind. His paper, submitted in August 2013, was closely scrutinized by academic “referees,” who asked for “some substantial revision” before it could be published, Anderson said.
It was their insistence on additional data and analysis, for instance, that led to the statement that there was a chance that the Meth Project may have had some small effect in reducing meth use among white high school students, he said. The decrease was not at all “robust,” Anderson said, but he included the finding in order to be “really conservative” with his data.
Anderson and Elsea submitted their revised paper in May 2014 and it was accepted by Health Economics on Sept. 16.
