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Teenage drug activity has always been "glamorized" in such a way to frighten people -- these are "wowser" stories. You take a real-but-banal problem, like drug abuse, and you sex it up to grab attention.
The pill party (or "pharm party") is a good example. Those parties have been used to scare parents since the 1950s, and yet they are almost impossible to substantiate. They were about as common as hippies spitting on soldiers returning from Vietnam. I remember seeing a movie about drugs in school when I was 12 (circa 1970), and it showed a pill party with a punch bowl filled to the brim with pills. It would take about 5,000 aspirin tablets to fill an average punch bowl.
The teen pill party story was doubtless taken from the "Bridgeport party" scandal of the late 50s. A group of couples in Bridgeport, Connecticut, would hold weekly parties where the wives would put their house keys into a bowl and each of the husbands would pull out one at random. Whoever's door it opened would be the gal the husband had sex with that night.
And I'm not sure whether THAT one was a real story, either.
Then we have Red Star Acid and LSD Babies, speed and angel dust thrill killings, pills that cause instant Parkinson's disease, etc., etc., ad nauseam. All of these stories are told ostensibly to "warn" people away from drugs, but they have the opposite effect.
Drug abuse is a real, actual problem. It ruins thousands of lives every day, and our country has tied itself in knots over it. But it isn't all that sexy. Not only that, but most kids have very little interest in drugs outside of social, not just peer, pressure (note that well!) which is stoked by drug hype.
Alcohol is a bigger problem -- and even more banal.
The truth, shorn of all hype and bullshit, is sufficient to keep most people away from drugs. That will leave the small number of people with hard-core physiological addiction problems, who should be treated medically; and disease certainly isn't sexy.
But stories of teen-age drug thrills at clandestine parties just keeps the glamor alive, while the reality always stays a lot more dull and sickening. Drug addiction is a gray and miserable world. Wild stories have no place in recovering people from that life, no matter how well-intended.
--d!
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