As condescending and sarcastic as that title sounds, there are certianly better reasons to prevent kids from using drugs, but sadly movies like this tend to backfire with their message as badly as Reefer Madness and Cocaine Fiends did in the 1930's.
Judge William B. McKesson narrates and appears in this movie. He speaks to us in a Broken English accent, aghast that there are headlines in the newspapers related to crimes involving drug addicted teens. He's shocked that this could happen so often in the mid-20th Century USA, as if it's something you might expect at another time in another country. Of course the judge mentions that at the time there were only two hospitals in the entire nation that specialized in the treatment of drug addiction. If this is true, then most junkies were probably dumped in mental hospitals and given treatment that never worked for them, including lobotomies.
To emphasize his case, he brings up one addict he knows of named Phyllis Howard, agreeing with her parents to let (or perhaps coerce) her into telling the world how she got into smoking pot and shooting heroin. The judge picks up a photo of young woman from her senior high school year and describes her as being "pretty as a picture." She looked like a damn '30's girl! Somebody on the Internet Archives website actually thought it was the girl's mother!
As one might expect, she and the rest of society has the wrong idea about what kinds of kids end up on dope. She learned about them in junior high, and believes that only the kids who "couldn't get along," "were afraid of everything" and "have no backbone." This is an idea that more or less lasted well into the 1980's, sadly. The same year that Molly Ringwald said "only burnouts like you get high" to Judd Nelson in "The Breakfast Club," a doped up New York City preppie killed his girlfriend in Central Park, supposedly during rough sex. Anyway, Phyllis tried pot on a double date because her first boyfriend and the boyfriend of a friend of hers were on it and got high right away, and evidently too high for even her junkie friends. Then she crashes when the date is over, but now spends her young life living for the next fix. She stops wearing make-up and let's her hair flop down.
Then she meets a well-dressed heroin addict and dealer named "Chuck," and in her effort to get a better high, buys some heroin from the guy, and marries him just so they can both get wasted with one another 24/7. Until one day, Chuck gets busted by the LAPD and she struggles to find all the stash that he dumped. Eventually she tries to get her fixes the same way as Chuck and she ends up with the same fate, although she could've ended up on a robbery spree or selling her body. After getting busted by the cops, she ends up spending five days in jail undergoing painful withdrawal from her addiction in the detox unit. And I don't care what anyone says. Phyllis looked better when she was strung-out and detoxing.
The judge suddenly mentions the possibility of communist involvement with dope trade, which might seem like nothing more than knee-jerk McCarthyist hysteria, until he cites the fact that the so-called "People's Liberation Army" sold opium to the people of China to ruin the Nationalist government's efforts to win the war, then shot addicts where they stood. Regardless of this, the truth was that drug dealers, including the Mafia, sold them strictly to make money for themselves. No matter how good the intentions of the makers of this movie were, it's attempts to keep kids from using drugs proved to be a dismal failure.
Judge William B. McKesson narrates and appears in this movie. He speaks to us in a Broken English accent, aghast that there are headlines in the newspapers related to crimes involving drug addicted teens. He's shocked that this could happen so often in the mid-20th Century USA, as if it's something you might expect at another time in another country. Of course the judge mentions that at the time there were only two hospitals in the entire nation that specialized in the treatment of drug addiction. If this is true, then most junkies were probably dumped in mental hospitals and given treatment that never worked for them, including lobotomies.
To emphasize his case, he brings up one addict he knows of named Phyllis Howard, agreeing with her parents to let (or perhaps coerce) her into telling the world how she got into smoking pot and shooting heroin. The judge picks up a photo of young woman from her senior high school year and describes her as being "pretty as a picture." She looked like a damn '30's girl! Somebody on the Internet Archives website actually thought it was the girl's mother!
As one might expect, she and the rest of society has the wrong idea about what kinds of kids end up on dope. She learned about them in junior high, and believes that only the kids who "couldn't get along," "were afraid of everything" and "have no backbone." This is an idea that more or less lasted well into the 1980's, sadly. The same year that Molly Ringwald said "only burnouts like you get high" to Judd Nelson in "The Breakfast Club," a doped up New York City preppie killed his girlfriend in Central Park, supposedly during rough sex. Anyway, Phyllis tried pot on a double date because her first boyfriend and the boyfriend of a friend of hers were on it and got high right away, and evidently too high for even her junkie friends. Then she crashes when the date is over, but now spends her young life living for the next fix. She stops wearing make-up and let's her hair flop down.
Then she meets a well-dressed heroin addict and dealer named "Chuck," and in her effort to get a better high, buys some heroin from the guy, and marries him just so they can both get wasted with one another 24/7. Until one day, Chuck gets busted by the LAPD and she struggles to find all the stash that he dumped. Eventually she tries to get her fixes the same way as Chuck and she ends up with the same fate, although she could've ended up on a robbery spree or selling her body. After getting busted by the cops, she ends up spending five days in jail undergoing painful withdrawal from her addiction in the detox unit. And I don't care what anyone says. Phyllis looked better when she was strung-out and detoxing.
The judge suddenly mentions the possibility of communist involvement with dope trade, which might seem like nothing more than knee-jerk McCarthyist hysteria, until he cites the fact that the so-called "People's Liberation Army" sold opium to the people of China to ruin the Nationalist government's efforts to win the war, then shot addicts where they stood. Regardless of this, the truth was that drug dealers, including the Mafia, sold them strictly to make money for themselves. No matter how good the intentions of the makers of this movie were, it's attempts to keep kids from using drugs proved to be a dismal failure.