The Road to Hell

Of course, the story of the descent into perdition favored by Davis and other of his compatriots in mental hygiene films is the temperance tale. Alcohol, aside from drinking-driving films, was not actually a much featured topic - since, through the time the films were made, alcohol was well accepted in the U.S. (Betty Ford had not yet come forward, leading to the boom in alcoholism treatment and, eventually, a new temperance signaled by a decline in alcohol consumption beginning in 1980.) Davis did produce Alcohol is Dynamite (1967), a reminder of the "fatal glass of beer" straight from the nineteenth century. Two boys, trying to buy some alcohol, encounter a sports writer who instead tells them about three other boys who began drinking. Although in the flashback the drinkers immediately double up in pain and become zombies after their first swig, they resume drinking as soon as they regain consciousness. The narrator of their fates tells how one of the boys ended up on skid row, the other joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and the third vowed never to drink again - which he didn't. "How do I know?" the narrator asks rhetorically. It turns out that boy was his son.

Nothing shows better that mental hygiene films were not educational efforts, but moral fables, than educational movies on drugs. However, like films about menstruation, the principal producers refused to touch the topic, leaving production to independents who specialized in drug films. The earliest of these films, Drug Addiction (1951), showed the results for Marty of smoking marijuana. Stoned, he drinks from a broken Pepsi bottle and cuts his mouth to ribbons. Directly after smoking marijuana, Marty buys heroin from a local drug dealer, and proceeds straight downhill. Marty then enters a countrified rehab center where he farms and plays baseball, and soon recovers.

The focus on heroin was typical of these early films - drug use was not common among young Americans, and the idea proposed was that any drug use led virtually instantaneously to heroin addiction. Young people progressed from marijuana, to heroin, and to sobriety in a matter of weeks in The Terrible Truth and H: The Story of a Teen-Age Drug Addict (both made in 1951). Urban-centered films such as Narcotics (1951) and Monkey on the Back (1955) were among the few mental hygiene films in which African Americans ever appeared. By the 1960s, youthful drug use had become an actual concern for Americans, and drug films became a staple of the social guidance field. Nonetheless, marijuana was still shown inevitably to produce immediate mental deterioration and to lead inevitably to use of narcotics or LSD. In the 1967 version of Narcotics: Pit of Despair, the protagonist laughs maniacally after one puff of marijuana. As in earlier films, excruciating withdrawal is depicted, but then the young man is sent to a hospital where "the very best treatment modern science can give" is available.

Every cliché about drugs that you have heard has been memorialized in one of these drugs films - yes, LSD users stare at the sun until they go blind in the officially-titled LSD-25 (1967). Flashbacks are documented in Trip to Where (1968) and Curious Alice (1969). Marijuana (1968) was narrated by Sonny Bono, whom Smith reports "looks and sounds as if he were stoned." The pot smoker in this film stares at himself in a mirror - "until his face is replaced by a rubber monster mask!" Of course, while claiming to educate, these films imitated the drug exploitation films of the 1960s (like Roger Corman's 1967 The Trip), Hollywood films about narcotics use (like Otto Preminger's 1955 The Man with the Golden Arm), and the most famous drug film of all, the 1930s' Reefer Madness. The filmmakers simply could not ween themselves from their moral crusades no matter how scientific-seeming the film was purported to be - in Drugs and the Nervous System (made in 1972, the most recent film included in this book), LSD users run into traffic because they "believe they are God." Indeed, it is their growing isolation from reality that, in Smith's view, drove the standard mental hygiene film into extinction, replaced by more open-ended, 1970s "discussion" films.

Whereas, Smith feels, "In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when kids wanted to conform, they [mental hygiene films] were effective. In the late 1960s, when kids didn't, they were not." Even the irrepressible Sid Davis was moved to simulate greater reality in Keep Off the Grass (1970). In this film, mom finds a reefer in Tom's room. Tom's dad lectures him, "prolonged use may result in a loss of ambition. . . ." [the ultimate downer in Davis world]. Tom learns from several cops that, "Not every pot smoker goes on to heroin, of course. A personality factor is undoubtedly largely responsible for that step." But, then, Davis could not resist then speculating, "Very likely the same personality factor which turned the user onto pot!" As we can see, Davis could not remove the blinders of the genre.

Yet, we may inquire how much American educational films and public health messages have changed since the heyday of the social guidance movie. AIDS is even superior to syphilis for warning adolescents to avoid sex, even though it is virtually impossible that an adolescent will contract the HIV virus in sexual intercourse with another non-drug-injecting teenager. The Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) - whose president Joseph A. Califano, Jr. is former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare - has recently repopularized the "progression" model of drug use depicted in these films with the "gateway" model. Califano and his colleagues point out that heroin addicts nearly all began their drug-use careers by smoking marijuana and cigarettes and drinking alcohol (although microscopically few alcohol or marijuana users become heroin addicts). In a fraction of the 10 minutes required for a mental hygiene film, ads by the Partnership for a Drug Free America present the identical picture of the consequences of drug experimentation.

In fact, the lesson of the mental hygiene film seems to be that American moralism about personal behavior is inextinguishable. Media messages convey the same inexorable progression from pleasure to perdition that American blue-stockings have always maintained - a message largely absent when Europeans deal with drugs, alcohol, and sex. Likewise, the obsessiveness and fear-based nature of public health education, and of the American view of the world, still seems to be a distinctive characteristic of the American psyche.

In any case, I can't wait for the film version of Mental Hygiene.

next: Court-Ordered Treatment for Drug Offenders is Much Better than Prison: Or Is It?