Twenty-two years have passed since the BBC's Grange Hill depicted the descent of Zammo Maguire - played by Lee MacDonald - into drug-addled hell. Out of his mind on heroin, Zammo was plagued by zits and wore a stupefied expression. To millions, heroin just seemed a bit rubbish. Three years later I bumped into 'Zammo' in a nightclub in the Lake District. His spots had cleared up and he was surrounded by women. Sure, Zammo had fame, but in truth he was no looker. Instead, his appeal seemed incontrovertible proof that the drugs do work.

But, of course, there was one other thing that guaranteed to increase the lure of strong drugs more than Zammo's sexual magnetism ever could - it was the, er, Establishment telling you to just say no.

Later came the realisation that not everyone who forgot to say the n-word actually died.

Eventually, even the government realised that the zits of Zammo were doing little to curb Britain's burgeoning drug culture. Eventually, in 2003, came Frank. Now Frank may have sounded like a middle-aged bloke who had never inhaled, but he was a mate. Frank played it straight. Frank was the figurative friend who fronted the government's new £3m 'Talk to Frank' anti-drug information service but, in a transparent attempt to gain some credibility, Frank seemed to be trying too hard.

All right, so Frank warned that crystal meth would make your teeth fall out - very uncool by the way - but it joked about heroin in a way that even Zammo would have found unfunny.

The Home Office campaign included a radio advert that showed an addled shop assistant muddling his words during a mundane exchange with a customer. To this day, the unintentional comedy routine remains the last time the government could be accused of trying to squeeze a laugh out of heroin, a drug whose UK death toll runs into the thousands.

Ever eager not to be a spoilsport, Frank also revealed that ecstasy promoted affection. One prime-time television commercial depicted a high street bustling with adults on the drug hugging, not just each other, but lampposts, street signs - anything they could grab really. Choose hugs and you too should do drugs, ran the hard-hitting message. Was this not slightly confused - who doesn't like a good cuddle?

It was all rather different from the mid-Nineties poster campaign Sorted, which featured teenager Leah Betts on a life-support machine after her 18th birthday party, during which she took ecstasy. The ad triumphed in attracting the predictable dose of opprobrium from the mainstream media, but fell short when hug-heavy clubbers kept on holding hands in their hundreds of thousands. Ultimately, its message would morph into the serious revelation that H2O could kill. Betts, said the official inquest, died not from ecstasy, but from drinking seven litres of water in 90 minutes to offset the drug's dehydrating effect.

But Zammo and Frank were not the first campaigns to have dabbled clumsily with Britain's complex drug culture. A year before Zammo's face erupted, a series of anti-drugs films opened with the line Heroin Screws You Up. Designed to shock, its exposé of the horrors of heroin and brutal portrayal of high-cheek-boned addicts unintentionally set a glamorous template for the 'heroin-chic' waif style.

In short, Britain's anti-narcotics campaigns have largely failed to address the complexities of drug culture. Ministers even recently considered one aimed at primary school children, which included explaining what the most exciting drugs looked like and not to touch needles.

North of the border, research to appraise the effectiveness of the Scottish Executive's Know The Score anti-cocaine campaign confirmed that more than one in 10 who have seen it are more likely to have a sniff.

Elsewhere, a government-funded drugs charity reveals how to roll a joint, accompanied with the unswervingly sensible advice: 'Don't get caught.' Another government-funded service sends sassy literature to classrooms with its cannabis pamphlet resembling a Rizla packet, presumably so pupils don't run short of decent roach material. Time, perhaps, to bring back Zammo.