DARE message- stay the fuck away from Angel Dust.

I am a child of the mid-to-late eighties/early-nineties. As such, I grew up with cartoons that were thinly veiled propaganda and anti-drug messages that were INCREDIBLY effective.

Protect America from Communism by using Consumerism! And Robots

We all remember the "This is your brain" ad's which were good, they taught us how taking drugs cause you to make fried eggs and then make loud clanging noises with pots and pans, eventually causing you to ruin your kitchen. That was important to me because I liked the kitchen and I hated loud noises. Also eggs were gross.

Eggs are gross ergo drugs are gross.

To this day I remember an advertisement wherein a a model removes her dress, then removes her false breasts, then removes her make-up, her teeth, her wig and then her leg leaving this grotesque zombie on the screen. I have no idea what drug they were warning me against- crack? pot? cigs? beer? - I don't know, I just resolved to stay away from everything so that I didn't accidentally become an Umbrella core "side effect".

Fast forward to my first grown-up business trip. I got to go to a conference in Hawaii. Rain forests! Beaches! Volcano!  The brochure forgot to mention that Hawaii has a serious meth-problem. So I was constantly confronted with signs like these:

http://hawaii.methproject.org/Our-Work/print.php

Which any right thinking person thinks are hilarious! Seriously, I lost my shit on a bus when I first saw these. They are VINTAGE Partnership for a Drug-Free America stuff. None of this whiney "Don't do pot-for Jesus!" crap my little brother came home with no! Stark realizations on how drugs change your life! Cautionary tales that if they don't seem way out there to you make you re-think a life choice.

I like to imagine that there is a guy. He's been a tweeker for a little while, he just finished giving a BJ in a gas station bathroom for $10 and then beat up an old man for money and he realizes "Crap! If I don't get back to the house in 20 minutes, I'll miss my turn to use the mirror to check my skin for bugs!" So he gets on the bus and sees this advertisement and suddenly it changes his life. He's all like "Whoa! What am I doing?" and he starts street preaching and shaking his fellow tweekers going "Man, without meth we might have teeth! We could have skin! Think of a world with skin!"

And that makes me think about signs for life's other poor decisions. If all I need is a grungy picture and an uncomfortable line, I could make ad's for everything bad that I do.

Like:

Or call back joke:

Finally:

Angels property of BBC