Fun with drugs

I recall an interesting day back when I was in the joint. It was our drug science class, and the teacher showed us a film called Dead is Dead. It brought a message of all the wonderful things we could expect from using Heroin and other drugs.

The film's narrator was an old heavy set Black American seated with a lifeless droop in a Lazy Boy recliner, and he remained inanimate in that chair through the entire film. This man, with weary yellow and red eyes, and a deep dry monotone voice, was our escort into the unfortunate world of the inner cities. There we watched the effete and addicted living day by day, and the day always included drugs of one kind or another.

The first scene showed a white tiled bathroom where a man, shaking uncontrollably, tried to remain seated on a toilet. His body was rejecting whatever he had ingested and expelled waste into the toilet to the point of overflowing the toilet bowl with a dark grime which ran down the white porcelain onto the floor. The high contrast of the film gave unnecessary emphasis to the sight.

Another scene showed a young girl sent on a grocery errand by her mother. The narrator explained how she got a little side tracked and spent all her mother's money on heroin. The next scene showed the young girl sitting in a filthy stairwell holding her stomach while rocking back and forth. While our ghoulish stoic spoke, the girl suddenly threw up on herself with volume and force. For reasons I can't find, Bill Withers' Lean on Me was playing in the background. To this day I really don't care if I ever hear that song again.

There were the two boys who fancied glue sniffing. They each enclosed their heads in a plastic sack which they filled with fumes from the glue. They overdosed and died with the bags, misty with their last breath, still covering their heads. They ended up on neighboring autopsy tables as a matched set. While nobody looks good dead, I have to say that Black American features and ash blue lips are awful together, even with a Glad Bag veil.

There were other snippets, all concluded with an uttering of the film's title, and always causing the girls in the classroom to turn away in disgust. My friend and I stood our ground, proving we could take it all, but in truth I think I skipped lunch. And dinner. My breakfast the next day, wich certainly did not include oatmeal or Cream of Wheat, probably was a light one.

I wasn't interested in drugs of any kind, and the film neither added to nor took away from my decision. Remembering its one indisputable effect, I can say that if one is interested in weight loss, they should find this thing and watch it once a day. They'll be a size four in no time.