I am doing a paper for one of my classes. The professor is asking if we remember any type of drug prevention classes. Now, I dont consider myself old, but my memory or lack of it…lol cant think that far back, especially on this. I remember watching a movie, it was called Being Stoned…we all mocked and laughed at the title, but I can’t remember exactly what it was. Does anyone recall this movie and maybe programs that I cannot?
Thanks for the nostalgia…
I graduated High School in 1982 and we had them. We had teenagers who were recovering addicts come and talk to our Health class and a couple of scare films as well. I vividly remember one scene from a film of a teen being too wasted to get up the stairs to her apartment and throwing up white stuff all over herself. The background music was Somebody to Lean On.
Grew up in middle class America in rural Ohio in the 70’s and no we didn’t have any drug prevention programs, just some pamphlets that were handed out once a year in health class. Drug prevention classes were for those inner city kids; like the kind you saw in West Side Story. It was a simpler time and god we were naive; could happen in white America was the thinking.
Midwest, large city, suburban white middle class school. 1969 or1970
In 7th or 8th grade (age 12-13) we had health class. About once or twice a week. It was general info on how the body works, basic first aid, and yes,…gasp! there was a special day or two of sex education (boys and girls in separate rooms, (this was to encourage us to ask questions without feeling embarrassed, after they showed us “The Movie”)
A longer amount of time was spent on “drug education” than sex ed. They showed us movies about the terrible dangers of drugs , taught us the names and the slang terms for each drug (“uppers” “downers” “maryjane”) .It was controversial; Conservatives(especially religious groups) complained that the schools were corrupting innocent children by exposing them to dangerous information that would encourage then to experiment with drugs. Other groups of liberals proudly said that drug ed was vital in order to face reality,and to narrow the “generation gap” (a scary new term).
Oh, I love the internet – I was going to try to describe this film in which a girl drops some acid and sees her hot dog turn into a troll doll with a wife and seven kids. This made quite the impression on me --and I found it on YourTube
I was shown this in health class in 1972, IIRC. It made me want to run out and get me some LSD. We also played a board game that featured pushers and narcs and NO ONE wanted to be the narc.Could it possibly be Stoned (with Scott Baio)?
I vividly recall 1980… the 6th graders did projects on various drugs, complete with mock drug samples. Given the caricatured portrayals of LSD, who would not want some of that? And the rest of it was like “well, I didn’t know cocaine is a thing, but I’ll certainly be on the lookout for it.”
Damn I want to get jacked up on marijuana and drop a tab of what she had now. 
I don’t know if there were formal drug prevention classes in the sense of lectures that kids were told that they had to sit through, but drug abuse prevention activities go back quite a bit earlier than the 1970’s. An eye opening example is the 1936 “educational” film Reefer Madness about the dangers of the horrible new drug, MARIHUANA! (yes, it spells it like that). Also, antismoking (of tobacco) propaganda goes back to the 1600’s at least with King James’s “A Counterblaste to Tobacco”.
Graduated from a Catholic high school in 1970. I distinctly remember a couple of class periods where drugs and alcohol were discussed. As I like to point out, we also had sex education and were taught about evolution.
I only got up to Kindergarten by the time the 70’s were over but we definitely had really formal and extensive drug education classes by 6th grade. I remember mine quite well because my mother was also my science teacher that year. She taught us a really thorough drug prevention section to us and had already been teaching it for a few years by the time I took it in 1984.
It was some kind of fairly new state level program with a name that escapes me now but the idea had certainly caught on by then. That was also the time when MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and SADD (Students Against Drunk Driving) really took off as well. The 70’s were socially world’s apart socially speaking from the 80’s so I wouldn’t be surprised if such programs went from virtually nonexistent to extremely common during that time.
No, it was something way more tone-deaf and pretty boring except for all the snarking over who had to be the narc … I believe you rolled some dice and drew a card with a question on it such as
" If you drop a tab of acid, how many kids will your hot dog claim to have?"
No, just kidding - that might have actually been fun
No the questions were on the level of
““Speed” is the street name for ____________?” with the correct answer being amphetamines…boringly easy but at least the drug Ed classes bumped up your grades a little bit, especially for a subset of kids that weren’t generally known for academic performance .
Also about the same time there was “Marihuana: Weed With Roots In Hell”. Yeah, they spelled it like that. Both films later became cult classics with the 1960’s-1970’s drug-addled ( ) college crowd. You can catch them on YouTube. (ETA: Nixon’s Checkers Speech was also a perennial favorite.)
Graduated high school in '79, small city north of Milwaukee.
In middle school and high school we had drug prevention classes, but they weren’t real pervasive and came in little bits now and then. We’d have an assembly where some druggies and a counselor would talk about dope for 6 hours and that’d be it for 6 months.
When they’d talk about heroin we would all look puzzled. That wasn’t a white kids drug. There wasn’t any of that crap in our town that we knew of. Those were the days, I guess.
Graduated 76. We had a lot of really bad films and slide strips; usually as part of “health class”. The ones with Sonny and Cher are classics and can be found on YouTube. We once had some cop with a display but --------- that just didn’t work when he spotted two kids he had busted in the first class.
In my school, the Drug Ed course was taught in 9th grade. I know I said earlier that it was part of health class but I was mistaken - I’m sure the health teachers that were already saddled with showing the stupid Sex Ed films heartily rebelled.
It was taught as part of the History/Social Studies block - In 9th grade we spent mornings in the Block class then changed classes for math and electives in the afternoon.
It was a 6 hour course - 1 hour a week for 6 consecutive weeks.
The first week was an overview – then they taught a class for each drug that was on the radar back in the day
**Marijuana **-- I don’t think he short film they showed for this class was part of the “Case Study” series and I can’t remember the exact film but I’m sure it was something like this
Heroin
Unfortunately for them, any “awareness” that it raised was probably an awareness of the cool and intoxicating options available to us – a shopping guide of sorts
As I recall, Texas began to require a day of antidrug instruction, beginning in 1974. My school had a tradition of staging a mock political convention in senior social studies classes, and we modified that to satisfy the requirement.
I had some kind of drug education beginning in 4th or 5th grade. We were warned about heroin though we had no clue what it might be. I remember a cop came and burned some kind of incense that was meant to smell like marijuana and and warned us that if we smelled it, get away and tell an adult. We didn’t have any corny films, or at least I don’t remember them, but we did have one I always remembered–it was, I guess, news footage of people going wild under the influence of what we were told was PCP. And the horror stories really stayed with me–10 cops to hold a guy down, ripped handcuffs off, etc. So much so that when I got to college, after I’d been around the block a few times, I was shocked and horrified when a friend casually mentioned smoking PCP.
ETA. 4th/5th grade would have been 1977/78.
We had the same curriculum.
This was upper-crust suburban So-Cal. I graduated middle school (6-8 grade) in 1972. It extended a little ways into high school as well. Being more left-coast kind of area vice chappachula’s experience we had much less of the conservative backlash and much more of the liberal favorable push.
I remember some kind of drug prevention class when I was in eighth grade (which, in the New York City Catholic school system, is elementary school – there’s no middle school). So that would have been in 1972 or 1973.
Strangely, I don’t remember any sort of drug awareness education at all in high school. I do remember a fair amount of drug use, though.