I was talking with a friend several weeks ago and he reminded me of something i hadn’t thought about in a long time. we had gone to different elementary schools in the same year and district and had both been forced to sit through the same surreal anti-drug puppet show. Apparently it had made the rounds of the local elementary schools for several years.

This puppet show was more than a sock with a button sewed to it; it had production value. It had actual actors who sang and danced. It had lights, and sound and moving sets. And it had real, high quality puppets that presumably had to be operated by actual puppeteers. There were 4 or 5 puppets, each one representing a different anthropomorphic drug. I don’t remember most of them. The only one that really sticks out is the crack puppet. It was supposed to be a big piece of crack, but it looked like a cross between The Thing from the fantastic four and The Elephant Man’s skull. It’s eyes were little red glowing coals surrounded by blackness. It’s hands were skeletal, and it would suddenly burst out of the set at random times. That puppet was goddamn terrifying. I was never a kid who was afraid of things like puppets or clowns, but afterwards, when they let us take a closer look at those puppets, i wasn’t going anywhere near that goddamned thing.

This was only the most extravagant and absurd piece of propaganda shoved down my generations throat in the name of The War On Drugs. I’m not sure when they started in with it but I remember one worksheet from third grade very clearly. We were to match the drug in one column to its street name in the next. It was going fine until I had only two matches left; Marijuana and pot. I sat there for a second not comprehending. There had to have been some kind of mistake.

I should back up. My dad has been smoking pot for as long as I can remember, making no more effort to hide it from me then my mom did her cigarette smoking. Nor should he have, as it didn’t seem to effect him any more than my mom’s cigarettes did. The only difference I could discern was dad’s joints didn’t smell as bad as moms cigarettes. Looking back though some things make sense. A frequent memory is us watching Loony Tunes together, him eating a bag of grapes then falling asleep. Such were the traumatic memories of my dads drug abuse which so scarred my youth.

Here’s the thing though; dad always called marijuana pot. In school they always called pot marijuana, and so for years I had no idea they were the same thing. After the anti drug lessons I’d always think “boy, that marijuana sure sounds like rough stuff. Good thing my dad only smokes pot!” Not until we were made to fill out this worksheet did I even suspect the two were related.

I briefly wrestled with a kind of childish cognitive dissonance. My dad did not seem like a bad person, and certainly didn’t deserve to be in jail. Dad wasn’t the kind of loser they said people who smoked pot became. He was a veteran, a fire fighter. I mean, the man had a motor cycle. How could he possibly be a loser? This quickly faded though and was replaced by anxiety. They were going to throw my dad in prison! Several times I kept myself up at night thinking the cops would soon bust the door in and drag my dad out. I’d be left alone in the house, with an ill-tempered cat and nothing to eat but grapefruit from the tree outside until mom came and picked me up on Sunday. This is how I assumed it would work and I hate grapefruit. Far from convincing me of the justice of imprisoning people who use weed, or even of its danger, all the this drug propaganda did was make me feel like my family was threatened. Not by the drugs but by the state.

The anti tobacco stuff wasn’t much better. It’s message was pretty clear to me; if you smoke tobacco you will die a painful, agonizing death. My mom smokes tobacco. Therefore, my mom will die a painful, agonizing death. Being forced to contemplate my mothers impending mortality at the age of 9 was not fun. Needless to say I did not relish going to health class.

I remember taking Dare in fifth grade. Our officer brought in two joints and passed them around the class (unlit of course). They wanted us to know what weed smelled like. I’m not sure why. Perhaps they wanted us to know what the cops would be pretending to smell while they searched our cars without our consent. I honestly have no clue what purpose it served to have children know what pot smells like. Of course I already knew, and had known for some time, what pot smelled like, but I had to play along like I didn’t, else the man would get wise and lock my daddy up. When it was my turn to play sniff the joint I remember it smelled like weed, but less pungent, in fact i could barely smell it at all. So basically my fifth grad reaction to the cop’s stash was “I’ve smelled danker shit.”

Looking back it’s kind fucked up all the propaganda they shoved down our throats. Not so much the videos and endless worksheets they made us fill out, but the stuff they made us participate in: the chants, the matching tee-shirt days, the way were encouraged to narc on our friends and loved ones, the assemblies where we were rallied against the enemy of drug abuse, the final DARE ceremony where we were given faux awards for pledging to not do drugs. In retrospect the whole thing seems vaguely fascistic.

Not that it had much effect. As my class got older some of us did drugs, some of us didn’t. Some of us used drugs earlier, some of us waited til we were older. Some of us have developed problems and some of us haven’t. But when we got passed that first joint none of us thought “I don’t know, I once saw a puppet show that made some pretty compelling points.”

But if we’re being honest with ourselves I don’t think this propaganda was really for us kids. It was for our parents generation who had been whipped into a frenzy about drugs by the media and politicians. They were scared shitless and demanded to know what our leaders were doing to protect their precious children. So, in addition to throwing millions of human beings into cages, I had to sit through a patronizing puppet show with a demonic crack monster that has since haunted my dreams. Twice, by the way, were we made to sit through it.

I get angry sometimes thinking about what a waste this all was. I can’t calculate how much class time was wasted doing worksheets, going to assemblies and watching videos full of melodramatic music, lies and half-truths. We could have been doing science experiments, going on field trips to museums or making music. “Nope, name four reasons drugs are bad, m’kay? Besides there’s no money for those things anyhow.”

Don’t even get me started on the money. I did a little googling and found out that fucking puppet show cost $100,000 . That’s one hundred thousand dollars that literally could not have been spent less effectively. The city could have used that money to buy 100 grand worth of crack, then destroy it, and that still would not have been a stupider waste of money. Imagine if they had used that money to set up drug treatment programs in poor neighborhoods, or had just used it to make inner cities and their schools just a little less shitty. “Nope. Puppet shows for the suburbs, cops and jail cells for the inner cities” I don’t even want to think about how much money was wasted on DARE and everything else. There’s always money for anti drugs. Imagine if some huckster had come to the county asking for $100,000 to do a puppet show about algebra or history. They would have laughed in his face. But he said it was about the dangers of drugs and they couldn’t throw money at him fast enough.

In the end i guess it’s small potatoes in the grand scheme of the Great War On Drugs. There’s mass incarceration, corruption, the erosion of our civil liberties, and of course the miserable failure of the war on drugs to actually stop people from, ya know, doing drugs. All in all, if the worst that happened to me was having to sit through some weird puppet show, i guess I should count myself lucky.