I started first grade in 1971. I remember that all thru elementary school drug education was still the old style 50s ‘scared straight’, Refer Madness, over the top stuff. Like LSD making you jump off the roof thinking you can fly, or being so ‘hepped up on the junk’ you’d put the baby in the oven by mistake. By Middle school (i.e. the late 70s) things had gotten a lot more practical & realistic (and included sex ed, which turned out to be really no big deal). Pretty much ended there though, I don’t remember there being much else in High school. This of course was right before AIDS, safe-sex, and crack arrived…
In the early 1970s we did, both with all students assemblies and in “Health” class. Most of them were pretty bad with the exception of one former addict who knew how to speak to an audience that no one, be it users or clean cut, wanted to be there. Started off by telling of being with a group where a 50 year sheriff said he had never smoked grass or marijuana either. After the laughter died, the speaker said, see, this is what I deal with. People who don’t know marijuana is grass are lecturing about it. I know how you feel.
My sixth grade class had some drug education in 1977. In retrospect, it was remarkably sane. We learned the names of various then-common drugs, and saw pictures of them. We read first-person accounts of what it felt like to take several common drugs. We read some about addiction. We each had to put together a poster with some information about recreational drugs. We learned that you shouldn’t try a new drug alone – you should be in the company of someone who had taken it before.
I finished that class frightened of heroin and LSD, and curious why pot was illegal.
I was in upper grade school in the late 70s, and we had some of those same kinds of “education”, including the infamous mimeographed notice sent home to our parents about scary (and obviously stupid) pushers giving free samples of ACID to SCHOOLCHILDREN right in their playgrounds. And something about the tabs of acid had cartoon characters to lure in us innocent darlings, so’s we’d get ADDICTED and give up our lunch money for LSD.
Does anyone remember any drug prevention/awareness films from the early 70’s narrated by Greg Morris (from “Mission: Impossible”)? I have a vague memory of the 5th to 8th grade classrooms being herded into the school gym to watch one or more drug prevention films. I was probably in 5th or 6th grade at the time (Catholic grade school in the St Louis area).
I remember drug education in health class in 67. It started off with the teacher writing “street” names for marijuana on the blackboard and we had to copy the list down.
Pot, tea, grass, boo, weed, mary jane, etc. There was a double column of names. As I got older and, um, experienced more, I discovered a goodly number of those names were utter bullshit.
Then there were the films. I only remember the names of two of them, “LSD: Trip To Nowhere” and “Pit Of Despair” which featured a somewhat demonic looking character in a tan trench coat selling heroin to high school kids. I think it was the mustache and goatee.
Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) started in 1983; I think they were the biggest school anti-drug program, but not a particularly effective one.
I graduated high school in '79 and don’t recall more than 2 or 3 anti-drug presentations in any given school year. One of them was a film featuring Sonny Bono describing a drug trip. Not sure when he was ever a credible spokesperson to the nation’s youth.
The strangest thing is that the film was produced by Lockheed Aircraft Corp. 
Is that how everyone talked about drugs back then? She has the same unconvincing monotone that all the people on the old Dragnet TV show always have.
In the first semester of seventh grade, we had Health Science, which included a lot of material about drug abuse. This was in the fall of 1969, and I remember being given pamphlets that illustrated the most commonly abused pharmaceuticals. It seems that, back then, most barbiturates and stimulants were still under patent, so each had its characteristic color and shape. The street names thus alluded to the appearance of the tablets or capsules in question. I don’t even know what most of them were, e.g. “purple hearts”, “reds”, “yellowjackets” (Nembutal), “black beauties”, and so on. AFAIK, almost all of these patents have expired so the drugs, as manufactured for the legal pharmacy trade, can look like just about anything.
I love these drug threads… 
I’d answer the OP but truth is, if we did have drug ed back then, I probably wouldn’t remember it.
They showed us a movie with, swear to god, Sonny and Cher in like gold lamé outfits talking about how drugs were bad. There was also a local cop who brought in a bag of marijuana for us to smell, so we could recognize it if somebody tried to trick us into smoking it. It was, you know, old-fashioned 1970s weed, bag of shake probably. Compared to modern weed it all clunky and prehistoric.
I’m sure it was common enough to inspire a parody or two.
D.A.R.E. at one point used the slogan “D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs”. This was parodied sometimes as “D.A.R.E. to keep cops off donuts”.
It could be worse. Some genius came up with pencils with the slogan 'IT’S NOT COOL TO DO DRUGS", running from point end to eraser end. As the pencil was sharpened, it would eventually read “COOL TO DO DRUGS” and then “DO DRUGS”.
I’m glad my kids weren’t subjected to that… I think that ham-handed propaganda does more harm than good.
I was born in 1961, and went to a Catholic elementary school and a Jesuit high school… Starting around 6th grade (which would have been… 1972?) and continuing through my sophomore year in high school, there would be one or two days a year when we’d have to watch a lame documentary film about the dangers of drugs, or listen to a boring lecture by a representative of some anti-drug group.
Even BEFORE any of us used any illeegal drugs, we found such films hilarious. We’d come out repeating (in the narrator’s monotonous voice), “This is marijuana. Some people call it Mary Jane or pot.”
I dearly hate to admit it, but from '70 to '74 I went to the California High School where “420” originated.
Obviously, there were quite a lot of drugs in the area, and we weren’t all that far away in distance or time from the Haight-Ashbury and all that other psychedelic hippie stuff. In retrospect, it seems like the police were way, way behind the curve on doing anything effective about drugs, and so it was up to the schools to handle prevention through education as best they could.
We had a pretty large amount of anti-drug education in the classroom, IIRC. It also came up in discussions in various classes as well.
Even before that in what used to be called Junior High School, we got tons of anti-drug stuff in the science classes. That would have been in '68-'69.
FWIW, there were a lot of books and phamplets in circulation (even in Junior High) about what all the diferent drugs were and what they could do to you. Most were pretty accurate. I never heard one could become a “reefer addict” on anything stupid like that. One book I particularly remember was quite in depth but had a lot of dated stuff; it was in a sort of an encyclopedia type format and would make references to the book “Junkie” and so forth. Good bathroom reading, anyway.
One of the little booklets I remember featured a character who was the stereotype hippie-druggie. Or maybe like a dark-haried version of the Muppet character they have now that plays the drums…
I guess it was pretty effective education, since I never got into drugs despite them being so readily available back then.
I heard the High School over the hill was much more negatively impacted by drugs, though I couldn’t prove it to you. Word was that those kids were better off and so had more money for dope. Later in life I read a True Crime paperback about a murder in that area, and the author said that it was not uncommon for kids then and there to be tripping on LSD on the lawn in front of the school. I have no idea about the percentage of guesswork in that, but I never heard of any such thing at my school. The point of my mentioning that is that they would have had the same anti-drug materials and curricula that we had, and (supposedly) the results were markedly different.
That stuff was presented in Health class in the late 70s. I also had earnest talks with my mother where she made me promise not to ever, ever use drugs. By which I presumed she exempted her cabinet of prescription drugs prescribed for her hypochondria. And then we had the example of of our math teacher P.H. who was stoned out of his gourd on the reefer. We could tell because he was just as mellow as all the potheads who couldn’t take his second year algebra class. If he wasn’t a cautionary tale, then there wasn’t one.
Yeah, it was always a Disney character, usually Mickey Mouse acid or Goofy!
The LSD that I dealt in the 80s had Bloom County and Doonsbury on the tabs.