Partnership for a Drug-Free America

The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, first known as the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) then later as the Partnership at DrugFree.org, is a New York City-based non-profit organization which runs campaigns to prevent teenage drug and alcohol abuse in the United States. It is notable for mobilizing volunteer talent "against a single social problem" to help young people "live their lives free of drug and alcohol abuse," and to assist parents in prevention efforts. The organization gets input from scientists, specialists in communication, researchers and others, and offers resources for parents and teenagers on its website. It focused efforts to "unsell" illegal drugs such as cocaine,heroin,prescription drugs, marijuana, MDMA, and others, as well as discouraging abuse of alcohol and nitrous oxide, by breaking away from a standard public service approach and doing a coordinated media campaign. While the organization has focused drug prevention advertising on broadcast media such as television, there are signs in recent years that it is shifting media support to emerging channels such as video-on-demand, digital technology and particularly the Internet. The organization's marketing experience was written up as a 58-page marketing "case study" for study by students at the Harvard Business School. The organization is perhaps best known for its iconic TV ad This Is Your Brain on Drugs, but it had made over 3,000 ads by 2011 while pursuing a flexible strategy.

The 1960s and 1970s had been turbulent years, marked by wider acceptance of drugs than in previous decades, as well as a consumer culture encouraged by advertising in mass media. There had been sporadic efforts by anti-smoking groups to discourage cigarette smoking, and tobacco company executives learned that sales would decline overall if pro-smoking ads were shown in the same proportions as anti-smoking ads. In the 1980s, the nation faced a serious problem with drug abuse. At the time the Partnership was created, the nation was in the throes of the crack cocaine epidemic.