Los Angeles, California
For nearly thirty years, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program has focused on educating children and teenagers about the danger of controlled substance abuse. While it has met some success, drugs are still a major part of teenage culture. But a new approach is being implemented that, though unorthodox, is garnering massive support due to its effectiveness.
Officer Graham Lotski, 57, is sitting behind the teacher’s desk in an empty classroom at a high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District that has asked to remain unnamed in this article. There are forty desks in the classroom, each with a small sealed Tupperware container with the words “Don’t open until instructed” printed on the lid.
Before the students arrived, Lotski said, “We’ve tried scaring kids off drugs with stories about the awful shit that happens. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. We have to show them.”
The students filed into the classroom and sat down at their desks. Lotski held up a small scrap of paper. “This,” he said, “is Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. But you know it as LSD or acid. Now, I could tell you about how dangerous it is and why you shouldn’t do it, but we all know that won’t work. So I want you to open the container on your desk. Inside is one blot. I want each of you to do it.”
After a moment of initial hesitance, all the students had dropped acid. As the effects started to kick in, Lotski lowered the overhead lights. He then turned on speakers emitting nightmarish noises, and turned on an overhead projector displaying production stills from horror movies. This went on for hours, the entire time Lotski shouted, “Drugs did this to you!”
Lotski explained that, “it will be a long time before these kids consider doing drugs again.” A visibly shaken Marty Friedrich, 17, said, “My intestines turned into snakes and tried to eat their way out my eyes. I don’t want this to happen again.” Sally Ronaldson, 16, held a similar opinion, “Unending horror. A swarm of locusts and a pox upon all the earth. Death comes not to those who wish it.”
Photo courtesy of Bill Gracey on Flickr Creative Commons
comments
An acid trip is what you make of it. No shit that these kids had a terrible trip - this officer decided to be a dickhead and purposefully scare the shit out of them. If he wouldn't have done that, the trip would have been fine. Those kids must have had some DAMN strong acid, because one tab won't get you anywhere near that high. From what those kids said, that sounded like somewhere between 300 and 500 micrograms - which is 3-5 hits. How long were those kids in that room? A blotter taken orally takes about an hour to kick in, and the effects usually last about 8 to 12 hours.
Drugs aren't bad. What people do with drugs is what makes drugs good or bad.
I challenge each of you to procure a tab of LSD. Take it with a couple of your friends when you don't have any plans. I guarantee you'll have the best night of your life.
This is like teaching people not to drive by putting them into a car and making them crash into walls.
Naturally that was a tongue in cheek comment...Difficult to talk to students at the school I worked at and now volunteer at about smoking and drugs because it's in a large Tobacco growing area....pot plants growing in the middle of Sweet Corn Fields....and many raids on houses operating grow ops and goodness knows what else. Many of our stds. grow up around legal and illegal substances.....They find it amusing when they see the police planes flying around...wondering who they are going to 'catch' next.....
RSS feed for comments to this post