Beyond LSD (1967): This movie astounded me because instead of telling parents that their kids are maniacs, it tells them to listen to them because they're going through some things. How is this even real?

Director Paul Burnford mainly made shorts and documentary films, like 1944's Nostradamus IV and the 1943 blood transfusion ten-minute epic Brothers in Blood. He also directed the first movie in the Rusty series and an entry in the A Crime Does Not Pay series, Dark Shadows, which is about a psychiatrist matching wits with a killer.

In short -- it's less about drugs and more about how to treat your kids. It's still relevant today.

The Bottle and the Throttle (1961, 1968): Narrated by Timothy Farrell, who was one of the two narrators and the psychiatrist in Glen or Glenda, as well Girl Gang, Pin-Down Girl, Dance Hall Racket, Test Tube Babies, The Violent Years, Jail Bait and many more. He was also a bailiff for the Los Angeles Marshal's Department when he was acting in movies like Paris After Midnight, which was raided by the Los Angeles Vice Squad during filming.

A bunch of kids a drinking beach beers -- Budweiser, Schlitz and Hamm's -- and Bill has had one too many. He ends up driving home and killing a child and breaking the back of her mother. Was it worth it?

Do you remember that wheel of how many drinks you had and how long until you sober up back in driver's ed or health class? Man, I used to think of that all the time and here I am, now trying to gauge edibles which are magical and unpredictable lunacy when compared to whiskey.

The major difference between the 1961 and 1968 films is that the former is made with the help of the Culver City Police Department and the Culver City Unified School District while the latter is made with the West Covina Police Department. I'd like to think these organizations were scammed and paid twice for one movie.

"The little girl died on the way to the hospital and the mother will probably never walk again. No matter how your trial comes out, you'll always have to live with those facts, won't you Bill. A child dead. A mother crippled. Not a pleasant future to face at the age of 18."

Pure nihilism.

Sidney Davis Productions also made The Dropout, Boys Beware (an anti-homosexual scare movie),the Ib Melchior-directed -- yes, the guy who wrote Death Race 2000 and directed The Angry Red Planet -- Keep Off the Grass, Skateboard Sense and LSD: Trip or Trap!

Curious Alice (1971): Dave Dixon, the Culture Czar, was the lead DJ of the legendary "Air Aces" on Detroit's rock station WABX and the first person to play Sabbath, The Doors, Led Zeppelin and The Doors in the Motor City. Beyond co-writing Peter, Paul and Mary's "I Dig Rock & Roll Music," he co-wrote this animated film that explains drugs through Alice In Wonderland which is totally right on with the kids and four years after Jefferson Airplane did the same thing in "White Rabbit."

The art in this movie is mind-boggling, however, and you'll be entranced as Alice learns about LSD from the Mad Hatter, speed from the March Hare, heroin from the King of Hearts and barbituates from the Dormouse.

Made by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1971 and meant for use with ten-year-old students, if I had seen this before my teen years I would have done all the drugs in high school. The National Coordinating Council on Drug Education agreed, writing that viewers "may be intrigued by the fantasy world of drugs" after watching it.

The Distant Drummer (1970): A short-lived series of four 22-minute American documentary films that warned the kids about drugs, these were all directed by William Templeton (The Fallen Idol) and written by Don Peterson.

The first two movies in this series, A Movable Scene and A Movable Feast, were narrated by Robert Mitchum, who served 43 days at a California prison farm for possession of marijuana in 1948, a conviction that was overturned in 1951.

Here's just a sample of Mitchum's speech: "Thousands of snapshots on police station walls remain the only link between many of America's most affluent families and the children who embodied their great expectations. Nearly everyone in the hippie community smokes marijuana -- whether they call it pot, grass, hemp, gage, joint or mary jane -- the marijuana is the basic background for the shared drug experience. The experience is shared to such an extent that roach pipes are always in demand -- a roach is a marijuana butt and it requires some form of holder for those last few drags. The new generation, whether they are runaways or rebels-in-residence, use marijuana as a symbol of discontent with the basic values of the establishment. For some, there exists a social imperative beyond flaunting society's rules -- for these adventurers the mind-expanding drugs open a window on a whole new frontier..."

The other two parts, Bridge from No Place and Flowers of Darkness, were narrated by Rod Steiger and Paul Newman.

Drugs, Drinking and Driving (1971): Herbert Moskowitz is now here to explain why you should never mix the three things in the title. I love that this movie has no issues with using the Mission: Impossible theme over and over and over, flaunting copyright law with each successive refrain.

This also seems pre-Jackass with a stunt where two drivers are each given drugs, one amphetamine and one barbituates, and then told to drive for 36 hours straight until they either pass out or wreck their cars.

LSD: Insight or Insanity (1967): "Now, everybody who takes it admits that there's always the risk of a bad trip, a bummer, a freak-out, even a flip-out. But, why be lame, baby? Give yourself a real kick. Yes, a kick in the head!"

That's Sal Mineo talking in this Max Miller-directed (the same dude who made the Sonny Bono anti-drug movie Marijuana) film which explains what LSD is, how it's made and when people take it they jump in front of cars and take leaps off cliffs like Diane Linkletter out of the windows of the Shoreham Towers, blamed on LSD even if the last person who saw her alive -- Edward Dunston -- may have also was the last person to see actress Carol Wayne alive. Then again, both Dunstons could be different people and for some other reason, people seem to confuse them with David E. Durston, the man who taught us that Satan was an acidhead in I Drink Your Blood.

See, I may make some detours, but I always get you back on the road.

This ends with a Russian Roulette freakout and Mineo singing over the closing credits, which inform us that everyone in this movie was not an actor. You won't be surprised.

LSD 25 (1967): Directed by David Parker and written by Hank Harrison -- the father of Courtney Love -- this movie is narrated by an LSD tab which proves that the creators of this may very well be getting high on their own supply.

"Today, you're high. Tomorrow, you're dead."

Yes, LSD starts all happy explaining all the good things it does and by the end, your fingerprints can't get out of any police database.

So go ahead and take that sugar cube. You'll learn all the secrets of the infinite and then, you know, you won't be able to tell anyone.

Because you'll be dead.

Narcotics the Decision: Goofballs and Tea (1958): Written by Pittsburgh native Roger Emerson Garris, who was the story editor for the Sherlock Holmes TV series, this police training film is all about barbituates and marijuana. Yes, people once called drugs these words.

Narrated by Art Gilmore, who was on Dragnet and voiced the radio announcer on The Waltons, this movie lets kids know that it starts with sneaking their parent's booze and ends up with you in jail, dead or worse. Avoid weed, avoid malt shops, avoid everything.

None for the Road (1957): Margaret Travis wrote 83 shorts that we know of, movies like The Other Fellow's Feelings, Health: Your Clothing and Rowan and Martin on the Driveway One Fine Day, an industrial film for Phillips 66 Petroleum where the future Laugh-In stars run a gas station. This movie, too.

But the director? That's Herk Harvey, who made around four hundred or more industrial films like Shake Hands with Danger. And one very important movie, Carnival of Souls.

Three men all use alcohol in different ways: not at all, a little and too much. They're like the lab rats that we later see injected with alcohol, which sounds like a good way to spend a weekend. But wow, we've been warning people about drunk driving for 65 years and not everyone listens.

The Trip Back (1970): It's no accident that an episode of Strangers With Candy was titled "The Trip Back." Jerri Blank on that show is literally the star of this movie, Florrie Fisher, played for comic effect.

Fisher was married four times by the time she filmed this speech, first an arranged marriage, then to a pimp, then another drug addict and finally to a man she met via the mail. She credited her recovery to Synanon, which was originally established as a drug rehabilitation program and became one of the most dangerous and violent cults America had ever seen.

Wait, what?

Founded by Charles E. "Chuck" Dederich Sr., Synanon -- a mix of togetherness ("syn") with the unknown ("anon") -- was an alternative community centered on group truth-telling sessions called the "Synanon Game", a form of attack therapy during which participants humiliated one another and exposed each other's innermost weaknesses. There are theories that Dedereich was given LSD by Dr. Keith S. Dittman and Dr. Sidney Cohen, as well as encouraged to start Synanon as part of the CIA MK Ultra program.

Headquarted in a former beachfront hotel in Santa Monica called the Club Casa del Mar, women who joined Synanon had to shave thei.

Drug Stories is a compilation of various videos from the 60s and 70s showing people why getting addicted to chemical substances is not good for you. There's no real story here because it is just an amalgam of various films, but there are some things to talk about. One of the first ones they show discusses marijuana and how doctors at the time were trying to discover whether or not it has any medical usage. They're unable to find any evidence that it enables you to stay awake longer or concentrate harder, but they do agree on one thing: it isn't good for you. They raise some good points here as well. The film says there's a difference between people taking drugs to get high and taking drugs as medicine to get well. When a doctor prescribes people medicine, he's had years worth of experience. When he hands over drugs to you, he knows what they'll do to you, why you need them, and how they'll affect you. What would a dealer know about any of that? The film goes on to say how even though weed may be basically harmless by itself, it tends to creep its way into your life as a habit, just like normal cigarettes. After a while, your body can't live without it. Not just this, but weed acts as a stepping stone for people looking to climb up the totem pole to access more dangerous drugs like meth and heroin. Even in the 60s, it's been said that meth kills, and it has. One thing that is said in the film is memorable to me. It says how almost every single heroin addict started by smoking weed, and he never thought he would do dangerous drugs like heroin. Once you're addicted to it, the way back is almost impossible, and living without the heroin is more physically painful than using it. This is just one film contained in this program. One of the best ones focuses on LSD, which was already widely used by the 1960s for its ability to make people experience outrageous and delirious hallucinations. This might sound fun at first, but LSD is so extremely powerful that a drop of it the size of a pinhead will send a roomful of people to the brink of insanity. Even getting one smell of it will force you to lie down for several hours. The film states how LSD is taken by people looking for an easy way to experience a good time, but every once in a while, they have a really bad trip. The user will see horrible things like visions from hell and will have no choice but to endure it for hours. Like weed, LSD is (by that time) being studied by doctors to find if it has any medical importance, but they find none. The risk of taking it is not worth the reward. Towards the end, a woman comes to speak to a bunch of schoolchildren in New York. She is a former drug user, and tells the kids how easily they can destroy someone's life. She has been arrested several times, and if someone else was in this situation, it would make sense for them to hate the cops. In reality though, it makes much more sense to help them. The police are only doing their duty to uphold order in society, and want to see you be successful and stay out of trouble. Drug dealers are not your friends, and only want to see you get addicted to things they sell so they can get rich. In all, Drug Stories is a strange experience that can ironically be compared to being on drugs, since a lot of it feels very dreamlike, especially during the LSD film that features a lot of colorful patterns.