I grew up in the Nancy Reagan “Just Say No” eighties. I don’t know what it was about that decade. Maybe people had so much fun doing drugs in the seventies that in the eighties they figured they had to really swing for the fences to scare people into not doing them.

People find the propaganda comical these days. It probably is but I have to admit that it worked on me. I’ve never done any drug stronger than pot for fear that I would end up dead in a gutter. And it was all due to a certain segment of entertainment known as the anti-drug episode.

Firstborn

Now this is a movie but I’m including it anyway. Christopher Collet was one of my favorite actors when I was a kid. He was in The Manhattan Project and he played Theo’s friend with cancer on The Cosby Show. (Apparently he’s a pilates instructor in Brooklyn now.) His movie Firstborn scared the hell out of me. Everything is fine with Christopher Collet, his little brother Corey Haim and their single mother Terri Garr until Peter Weller shows up a brings cocaine into the picture. Pretty soon Terri Garr can’t function and their family is being torn apart.

Sarah Jessica Parker is in it too. As it goes for all of these, this is not recommended watching.

The Punky Brewster “Just Say No” Episode

Punky and her best friend are invited into the cool girls clique. They go up in the tree house and the cool girls clique want them to use drugs. As I recall it wasn’t just pot, it was drugs. In my memory they had a tackle box full of drugs. They had pot, quaaludes, cocaine, heroin, angle dust, LSD, these were not discerning popular girls. Anything went.

Peer pressure was the big theme here. I believe one of the popular girls OD’d in the episode? In any event, it scarred me for far longer than it should have.

227: Calvin’s Drug Dealing Friend

The plot to this episode is simple. Calvin was the neighborhood boy next door. He was a little dim but that was his charm. Regina King had a huge crush on him. In this particular episode, Calvin had a friend who dealt drugs. He lived large. Drove fancy cars, had expensive clothes.

In the course of the episode, we find that Calvin’s friend’s mother had no idea about her son’s actual activities until he’s shot dead in the street. The episode ends with this mother screaming, “What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?!” Roll credits.

I watched that episode when I was about ten years old.

The Drug Knot

Dermot Mulroney is a popular kid in school with a drug habit. One day, his little brother, played by David Faustino, finds his stash and does all of it. All of it. The episode ends with a middle school aged David Faustino, Bud Bundy himself, floating face down dead in the pool in the back of their house.

Tattle: When to tell on a Friend

This one starred Allison Smith from Kate and Ally. I loved that sitcom probably because my mom did. Allison Smith’s friend Tammy Lauren starts doing cocaine and, through peer pressure, gets their other friend to start using too. Pretty soon Tammy Lauren is a tweaking nightmare, paranoid as hell and beyond redemption. The episode ends with her having skipped town in search of more cocaine.

Desperate Lives

This is the movie notorious for the Helen Hunt scene. Helen Hunts character sees her boyfriend in the high school chemistry lab where he has been concocting a special – I don’t know – acid, PCP, angel dust, cocaine hybrid that he wants her to snort. She does and she jumps out of a window.

In retrospect, it’s a little comical. But that’s not what freaked me out. It’s the end. Doug McKeon and Tricia Cast are driving and they’re high as kites and they get into a car crash. They cut to Doug McKeon in the hospital and the doctors tell his parents that he’ll eventually remember what happened. In the middle of the night, he remembers that his girlfriend died in the car crash and he comes to screaming, “She’s dead, she’s dead!” He ends up in a hospital bed with his arms restrained by leather bracelets, practically comatose (probably because of sedatives which are drugs but the movie leaves that ethical quandary out). This movie was exaggeration of the highest order and I should not have been watching it when I did.

I Learned It By Watching You!

This is it, the daddy of them all, the craziest anti drug ad there ever was (“This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs,” did nothing for me by the way). In 2018, this ad is a bit of a joke, but to young me, it was a real situation where families were being torn apart by drugs use. (Note again that it’s just “drugs” that this kid is using, not pot or acid or cocaine, he’s using a cigar box full of just “drugs.” All of them at once.) The twist worked on me when I first saw it and even as an adult, it still kind of gives me chills.