OK, I'm sure most of us remember the famous "This is your brain on drugs" PSA from the late '80s. While it's a memorable ad, I prefer the more obscure anti-drug messages put out by Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Does anyone remember these ads? Feel free to comment on them.
I was also wondering if anyone remembered 3 ads that dealt with cocaine that I haven't been able to find on YouTube (I hope someone will upload them soon). Here are the descriptions of each to jog your memories:
1. A businessman snorts cocaine off a bathroom floor and crawls around while a voiceover says "Welcome to the glamorous world of drugs."
2. A rat snorts some cocaine, goes into spasms and then finally dies.
3. Another businessman, sitting in his office alone, pulls open a desk drawer, grabs a revolver, loads the chamber with bullets, turns the chamber a few times and then points the gun to his head. The commercial freezes on a shot of him with the gun pointed at his head, just about to pull the trigger. A voiceover says "Cocaine. It can cost you your brain."
Posted by Muffy Tepperman (Member # 1551) on :
"I learned it from watching you dad..........I learned it from watching you"
Posted by Zach (Member # 9459) on :
Jackpot! I located the businessman in bathroom and lab rat commercials on some videotapes. I went to my college's library and asked them to do an inter-library loan search for any videotape compilations of old anti-drug TV spots. They were able to locate two for me. I recorded them to DVD-Rs and will upload them to YouTube soon. There are some incredibly rare PSAs on these videos, some of which I never saw before. I just thought I'd provide a quick update on my search for these ads. Meanwhile, the quest to find the "businessman pointing gun to his head" ad continues.
The commercial with the businessman in the bathroom was actually much different from what I remembered. It shows 3 business types exiting a bathroom stall while one of them stays behind to check himself in the mirror. He then walks back into the stall to take out a vial of coke but drops it behind the toilet. He kneels down and reaches behind to grab it, but he can't get it because it's stuck. He then turns around to show himself sitting on the dirty bathroom floor. As all of this is going on, a voice-over is citing different statistics about cocaine deaths and emergency room treatments and how they've been going up. He then says right at the end, "Now if for some reason you weren't aware of all this, welcome to the glamorous world of drugs." The ad then cuts to a black screen with large bold, white text that says "Face the facts: Drugs are a dead end" with the Partnership for a Drug-Free America logo beneath it.
Posted by Crash (Member # 7484) on :
Zach, fantastic stuff. I'm so glad that someone is taking the time to make sure that it is preserved and distributed. Posted by Zach (Member # 9459) on :
Does anyone else out there besides me remember how some video labels like International Video Entertainment (later known as LIVE (which was originally IVE) and used to put anti-drug PSA's on before the movies? They usually came on right after the previews for upcoming releases. Here are some examples I found on YouTube and DailyMotion:
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