For tween girls in the 80s, there were two pivotal books you had to read: Forever by Judy Blume and Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (ooh, anonymous! You just knew it was going to be good). Forever taught you about sex—mostly that it is normal for boys to name their penises “Ralph.” And Go Ask Alice taught you about drugs.
f you reread it now, you will laugh your head off at the corny, heavy-handed antidrug messages written in the guise of a real diary by a good girl who ends up turning into a full-blown junkie after being slipped a hit of LSD at a party. But as a “young adult,” it was a totally believable shocker. There were two possible reactions you could have: Either it made you scared to death of drugs or it made you agree with your friends that it made you scared to death of drugs, but secretly you were thinking, “I cannot WAIT to try this stuff.”
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You know what else made us want to do drugs? Movies. And TV. And those DARE t-shirts. Pretty much everything made us want to do drugs. Here are our favorite childhood movies (not movies for children, but movies we happened to see during our impressionable youth) that made us realize that drugs are fun and cool, despite the countless, endless lies indicating otherwise.
WHERE THE DAY TAKES YOU
I don’t remember much about this movie, only that it didn’t make running away from home and becoming a homeless junkie prostitute seem all that bad. For one, no parents! If you run away, you can eat candy for breakfast, stay up as late as you want, and die early with no regrets. Cool! I used to fantasize about setting up a cute li’l bed fort under a bridge and meeting young hot street urchins with names like Zero and Puppy-Butt. My street name would be Cookie and I would live a long, hard life having to please my johns, but since they would let me use their blow dryers to feather my hair, it wouldn’t be all that bad. Eventually I would grow up and talk to kids about my life on the streets and my days on angel dust. I’m pretty sure this is not the plot to Where the Day Takes You, but it might be the plot to this one episode of Starsky and Hutch where Kristy McNichol plays a sharp-tongued sassafras. Both are really good.
CHRISTIANE F./ DRUGSTORE COWBOY/ JESUS’ SON/ REQUIEM FOR A DREAM AND SO ON
All heroin movies make me want to do heroin. It’s always good-looking people who call each other by cool nicknames and wear awesome jean jackets that are impossible to find even on eBay. In Drugstore Cowboy Matt Dillon refers to Kelly Lynch as his “old lady,” and because they were both really good-looking I thought that was a cool thing to be called. It seemed tough and created this “the world is our oyster” vibe. Billy Crudup was so hot in Jesus’ Son that when he and Samantha Morton stayed in bed for three days and “carried each other to heaven,” the veins in my arms started throbbing. Requiem for a Dream was supposed to scare us because of all the crazy consequences, but I saw that movie high and continued to get even higher when it was over. Marianne looking in the mirror while she’s fucked-up is a great moment in heroin-cinema history. The best heroin movie however, the one that is pretty much Carnation Instant Junkie, is Christiane F. Every single kid in this movie is a fox, and the more strung out they get, the hotter they get. They’re foreign, they eat cake and smoke cigarettes in the bathtub simultaneously, and they all hang out together on top of each other, creating one explosive hot bomb of leather, denim, dope, and hair dye. This is the world I expected to find when I was doing dope, but of course it doesn’t exist. Instead I found myself crammed in some apartment with bad lighting, a couple of Yo Kids (you know, white thugs that say, “Yo, kid!”), a crackhead named Camillio and his girlfriend, Checkers, who had more kids in this world than teeth in her mouth, and me and my pussy boyfriend. Wow, fun. I would make a movie about it but no one would watch it, which is unfortunate because it would probably be the only one that would make people not want to do heroin. Then again, maybe all heroin movies turn people off except for my friends and me because we’re all fucking crackhead losers.
Boogie Nights
The Breakfast Club The Breakfast Club
The Lost Boys Blown Away
MODERN GIRLS
Melrose Place
