Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb

Year Published: 1969

Creator: Alan Kishbaugh Chuck Bowman

Complete Record: Starts with an overhead shot of hands rolling a joint from a huge bag of weed. Great cheesy bongo raga music is playing. Then the joint gets passed around the party to a bunch of hippies. There’s a baby at the party too! One of the hippie chicks starts to spray paint the floor in a spiral. Then, an exterior long shot of the University of Texas at Austin campus. The voice over talks about who students are, and who are in the counterculture. We see a slick suave drug dealer selling a bag of grass to some kids. Various shots of kids selling and sharing drugs. Then we see an expert at a table telling us how dangerous drugs are. He has a bulletin board covered in samples of different kinds of drugs. He goes over the effects of different drugs. As he talks about tolerance, the camera cuts to a desperate overdose scene. He explains intravenous drugs and huffing. We see kids huffing paint. The we see close ups of marijuana leaves and examples of joints. Then some hip looking kids in nice sunglasses smoke a joint in front of their mom’s suburban house. We see a Nerdy kid at his bedroom chemistry lab mixing together some... drugs. He takes the drugs to a square party and convinces a girl to take his pill instead of her coca cola bottle. She freaks out and we see her bad trip. More square kids doing drugs and some being arrested. At court, one of the squares has to face his entire family and looks sheepish. Finally we see a kid in the hospital. As a solution, we see kids in church groups talking about drugs together.