Our morality lesson begins with some hijacked footage from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom of a cobra snake. The jaded narrator (Patrick Miller) drones on about how the snake has come to symbolize evil and death with it's life destroying poison. The snake waits to get it's fangs into the unwary and oblivious. 

The narrator continues saying that people should be smart enough to avoid this kind of poison but why then are so many people ready, willing and able to fall victim to another kind of poison - the horror of drug addiction (the scene shifts to someone cooking up a batch of heroin and injecting it into a syringe.)

We cut to a school and the narrator's drone sucks us in as he talks about how outcasts, thrill seekers and those just out for kicks are the usual ones who fall down the destructive path of addiction but no one is immune.

The poor hapless white-bread dope who will stumble and fall in our place is John Scott (Kevin Tighe) (who a lot of us will recognize as Randolph Mantooth's partner in the old Emergency TV show.) 

John's grades aren't that great and threaten to get him booted off the track team. John's life is a fragile stack of cards just waiting for the wrong wind to topple them over. Unfortunately, John has already taken the first step by popping a few bennies (that the film misidentifies as barbiturates) to help him get through a test.

Things get worse when John runs into an old friend, Pete, who dropped out of school last year (in truth Pete was arrested and sent to jail for drug trafficking. You can tell he's a bad influence do to his turtle neck and beard.) Pete is no real friend, though, he only sees John as another mark, a potential victim, for his drug trade so he invites him to a party. (Leave him alone, ya beatnik hippie!)

John turns him down saying he has to study for a test. John was hoping his folks would help him study but they're not home. All John needs is a little guidance to help him over this little hump and keep him on the straight and narrow but it's a push that won't come. He does get a push but not  from the right place. He dumps the books and head's to Pete's party.

And so it begins.

At the party Pete gets Helen, on of his addicts, to get John drunk and out on the dance floor. Helen gets her hooks into him and we can only hope that John is just acting the part of the square and his dancing prowess aren't that whopperjod. (The man has the rhythm of an avocado.)

Under the leering, lecherous of eye of Pete, and pulled along by the omniscience narrator chiding him for doing it just for kicks, John's road to ruin is now on the fast track. With Helen's help and the horrors of peer pressure John quickly graduates from "squaresville" by smoking pot.

What goes up must come down, however. Hungover, John blows off school work, which gets him kicked off the track team but that doesn't matter as long as he gets a more reefer. The narrator follows John as the effects of the weed soon have him in the grips of the munchies and space-time anomalies.

Soon pot isn't enough and John quickly moves on to mainlining heroin and we get a quick lesson from the narrator on how to prepare it (more on this later.) Pete assures him one hit won't hurt him (isn't that what he said about the reefer?) but one leads to another hit and without one comes the horrors of withdrawal.

John comes looking for more (swearing each visit will be the last and then he'll stop cold turkey) but Pete's nowhere to be found. He starts to go through withdrawal so two other addicts tie him down to the bed to control his spasms until Pete comes back. Now that he has John good and hooked Pete ups the price because he know John will pay it before going through withdrawal again. 

John sells off what he can (including the family silver) to feed his habit while trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy. No one must know he's a junkie.

His days are numbered, however. Helen has been picked up for shoplifting and rats them all out. John is picked up in the raid on Pete's hideaway. Being a first time offender the judge goes easy on John and sentences him to mandatory rehab. 

Several months pass and John is clean, sober and back on the streets. The narrator ponders if he will try to pick up the pieces of his life and move on or will he, like so many others, go back to drugs. 

Our answer comes when we switch back to the snake with the caption that reads "It Never Ends."

The End

I think comedian Dennis Leary said it best when he commented that we don't need illegal drugs when cold medicines like Nyquil and Sudafed are available over the counter.

I can attest to this. On one snowy day, in the grips of a horrible cold, I mixed a cocktail of Dayquil and Sudafed and headed to K-Mart to buy a new snow shovel. 

Entering the store, I headed down the wide aisle towards the seasonal displays, when the drugs kicked in. The wide aisle narrowed as my perceptions went fish-eyed and the world suddenly had a 30-degree tilt to the left. As I moved things were briefly suspended in time and space and then warped by. I threw myself to the side and clung to the shelves as people passed by convinced, in my delirium, that they were giving me the stink-eye so I returned it in kind.

I overcompensated for the perceived tilt of the store, lost my balance, started pin-wheeling with my arms and careened into the automotive department. Deducing that there were no snow shovels here hidden among the motor oil I finally had a rational thought. Through the haze I realized I was no longer right in the head and under the influence of the medication. 

It took me twenty minutes to navigate my way back out of the store inching along the wall. The icy cold air outside sobered me up enough to drive home. The sidewalks would have to wait until I slept this off. (My doctor later told me that I should no longer take any kind of medication that had stimulants in them or another episode would be likely.)

Beyond that, as far as coming under the influence (besides alcohol and beer) I can only claim two bong hits; sitting in the back of a tour bus going to see Pink Floyd and getting the second hand smoke from all the people torching up in the bathroom; standing upwind in a giant green cloud while burning out an old cow lot filled with wild marihuana; and sitting in art class, next to the hot pottery kiln, on a 108 degree day, with no air conditioning, while rubber cementing a project, when every known color in the universe started dancing before my eyes. I tried to catch some with my hands before passing out in the fumes, falling off the stool then waking up later in the nurses office. (I was soon a cult hero in school because classes started letting out early during the heat-wave due to my accident.)

The scathing call to take the high road comes across no louder and clearer in these short subjects then the ones considering the horrors of drug abuse. Adults never seem to grasp that the more you tell the younger generation not to do something almost guarantees that they'll go out of their way to do it beyond getting their "kicks."

These things are a riot to watch mostly due to the simulated, usually through some kind of wacko animation (the giant chicken in L.S.D. immediately comes to mind), effects the narcotics have on us. Any kind of drug intake usually resulted in a bad case of the giggles at best and violent motor activity and a loss of all sense of perception as a you shotgun a cup full of broken glass thinking it's a cup of coffee at worst.

The bad guys and pushers are always vile and the tempted heroes the squarest of squares. Subtlety is thrown out the window as the dominoes of life are stacked up on a springboard waiting for that one slight jolt to tumble them all over with the last one teetering on the brink of the precipice. Will if fall over the edge? That was usually up to the viewer (but the snide narrators didn't give us much hope.)

These shorts also commit one comical yet borderline tragic mistake. Comical in how obvious it is and you can't believe the filmmakers didn't realize this and tragic in that the majority of these shorts, while they try to warn us off, are basically "How-To" instructional guides on how to get high. Pit of Despair shows you how to cook up some heroin and to save the cotton because it can be boiled for an emergency hit. Goofballs & Tea gives you a step by step look on how to grow your own pot and does everything besides light a match for you. 

The same holds true in other shorts in other genres but with the "horrors of drugs" is the most hilariously obvious.

I don't think that's exactly the educating the filmmakers had in mind.