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Our
morality lesson begins with some hijacked
footage of
a cobra snake from Mutual
of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
The jaded narrator (Patrick
Miller) drones on about how the
snake, with it's life destroying poison, has
come to symbolize evil and death. And how
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 then why 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 ones who usually fall
down the destructive path of addiction, but
no one is immune. And the
poor, hapless, white-bread of a 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. You see,
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 his 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 due to his turtle neck and
scruffy beard.)
Pete is no real friend, though; he only
sees John as another mark -- a potential
victim, for his drug trade. (Leave
him alone, ya beatnik hippie!)
Pete
invites him to a party, but
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 will never 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 and getting high. However
what goes up, must come down. Hungover,
John blows off school work, which gets him
kicked off the track team. But that
doesn't matter as long as he gets 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 to keep him high, and
John quickly moves on to mainlining heroin
-- and we get a quick lesson from the
narrator on how to prepare an injection (more
on this later.)
Pete assures him one hit won't hurt him (isn't
that what he said about the reefer?),
but one hit 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 the
spasms, until Pete comes back. Now that he
has John good and hooked, Pete ups the
price; because he knows John will pay up before going through withdrawal again.
While
trying to maintain some semblance of
normalcy, John
sells off what he can (including
the family silver)
to feed his habit. No one must know he's a
junkie. But his days are numbered.
Helen has been picked up for shoplifting
and rats them all out. John
is picked up in the raid on Pete's
hideaway. But being a first time offender, the
judge goes easy on him 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
toward 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 adjusted for these new vectors,
and kept moving, things in front of me
were briefly suspended in time and space,
and then warped by to some place far, far
behind me. 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.
Overcompensating
for the perceived tilt of the store, I
lost my balance, started pin-wheeling with
my arms, and careened into the automotive
department. Deducing that there were no
snow shovels hidden amongst the motor
oil, I finally had a rational thought.
Through the green 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, and the icy cold air outside sobered me
up enough to drive home. The sidewalks
would have to wait until I slept this off.
Later,
my doctor later told me that I should no
longer take any kind of cold-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 a little reefer, 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 a hot pottery kiln, on a 108
degree day, with no air conditioning,
while rubber-cementing a project together, when
every known color in the universe started
dancing before my eyes. While falling off
the stool, I tried to catch
some of the globs with my hands before
passing out in the fumes, and then I woke up later in the
nurses office. (I
was soon a cult hero because classes
started letting out early during the
heat-wave due to my accident.)
The
scathing call to take the high road in
these short-subjects comes across no
louder, and clearer, than in the ones
dealing with 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 --
and it's way beyond getting their
"kicks."
These
things are a riot to watch, mostly due to
the simulated
effects the narcotics have on us -- usually
through some kind of mondo-overacting or wacko-animation (the
giant chicken in L.S.D.
immediately comes to mind.) Any
kind of drug intake usually resulted in a
bad case of the giggles at best, and at
the worst, 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 mug of coffee.
The
bad guys and pushers are always vile, and
the tempted heroes and heroines 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 it fall over
the edge? That was usually up to the
viewer (but
the snide narrators rarely gives 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. Narcotics:
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" it is the most hilariously
obvious. And I don't
think that's exactly the educating the
filmmakers had in mind.
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