Learning Day: Nightmare on Drug Street

Possibly you've seen Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, the anti-drug picture that was the most ambitious crossover event in history from 1990 to 2018. While it got dark enough to trouble little Merritt back in the day, few things didn't. I mean, we're talking about a child who found James Bond Jr. to be an anxiety-inducing experience.

Suffice it to say, then, that 1989's Nightmare on Drug Street would have shattered me.

If Cartoon All-Stars was the carrot of fun times with ALF and Tigger, then Drug Street is the stick of flaming death in the ruined hulk of your older brother's convertible.

We had our own version of this kind of messaging when I was in school, and you probably did too. Ours was an ex-cop who came to an assembly and told us that marijuana would scramble our young brains. I think. I'll be honest, my memory has been pretty scrambled at this point from all the drugs. But if Drug Street is anything to go by, I got off easy.

Meet our cast: Felipe, Jill, and Eddie. They're dead and in hell. Maybe not hell? Possibly purgatory. They all died because of drugs, but more specifically because of mistakes they made regarding drugs. They're bereft of the essentials of late '80s childhood, which means no hamburgers, no pizza, no movies, no television, no MTV. In modern terms, that roughly translates to a purgatory-wide TikTok ban.

Speaking directly to the audience, the kids state their intent to share their stories with us. It's unclear if this is penance or just something to do to while away eternity. Eddie promises us that it's going to be "a real scary movie," a "nightmare on drugs." Did he flub the line? Or did their lawyers think it was fine to rip off Freddy in the title but not the dialogue? This was the same year that Will Smith was sued for his unlicensed Nightmare on Elm Street track, but Drug Street seems to have flown under the radar.

Felipe's up first. Jill narrates, telling us that Felipe is a senior in high school who thinks getting loaded is a way to have a good time. Her smug, superior tone here would feel a little less incongruous from someone who wasn't a fellow damned spirit. Don't worry, Jill will get hers too. We already know nobody makes it out of this alive.

For now, Felipe and his two pals are celebrating their win in the big game, slamming back beers and shooting hoops in front of his family's suburban home.

All is well until Felipe decides to light up a joint. His one friend approves, requesting a hit of that jank-ass '80s weed, but said friend's little brother — the squarest white kid to have ever appeared in an anti-drug PSA — says that he doesn't think smoking dope is too cool.

Oh, you don't think smoking dope is cool, upstanding '80s white boy? How about driving your old man's convertible around town while drunk and high? Do you think that's cool?

The kid's withering look of disapproval bounces off Felipe's "we're never going to die!" attitude and the trio hops in Felipe's older brother's convertible, cruising down the sparsely populated main drag of their sleepy town at a terrifying 15 miles an hour.

He might be a downer, but that kid can see where this is going. So can Jill.

The little brother asks Felipe to stop the car, and he responds by making him get out. Felipe's friend plays it like they're dropping him off to die in the middle of the desert rather than in the kind of charming mixed-use urban public space which is now illegal to build in America. Cue the sad Charlie Brown music as kid brother begins giving pathetic little kicks to Felipe's empties.

Three seconds later, Felipe and his friend are dead in a car crash.

No fucking mercy. But the messaging here is a little off. If I didn't know anything else about beer and pot, I might come away thinking I'd be fine as long as I didn't combine them with car. Can't go too hard on the alcohol industry, of course, and kids were savvy enough by the '80s that they saw through Reefer Madness tactics. Can we do one about a drug we can really give it to?

Oh fuck yeah.

Jill's throwing a party for her middle school friends and asks the handsome new transfer student to dance with her. He accepts, and she's on top of the world. Nothing could be better than this, she imagines. Nothing Compares 2 Craig. Oh, to be her in a few minutes!

After a quick bout of chaste waist and shoulder-holding, Craig suggests they go out into the romantic night. Eddie, our narrator for this segment, says it's just like a horror movie where you're yelling at the characters not to go into the basement.

But it's not like we know anything is wrong with Craig at this point. He's been the perfect gentleman thus far, and when the pair heads outside, it's a magical moment — the two of them sitting next to a fire, the in-ground pool shimmering in the moonlight.

Or, at least it would be, if Craig's twelve-year-old reward center wasn't lighting up in anticipation of that first magical hit of the night. He chops up lines while Jill tries to deliver exposition about her family heirloom necklace and how important it is to her, this necklace she loves and which represents her innocence and unbreakable connection to family.

Jill asks Craig what he's doing with that funny little straw. "A toot. Cocaine. No sweat!" Craig explains, sweatily. Jill suspects it's dangerous, but Craig maintains that the only danger is in getting caught. Besides, he says, as the now-familiar sense of power and confidence rushes through him, they're going to make it legal someday so you can have it whenever you want!

Eddie is not impressed. They're never going to legalize cocaine, he insists. The alcohol and tobacco lobbies wouldn't allow it, plus the ingrained racial biases of the American legal sys- I mean, it's bad for you and incredibly addictive, in a different way from alcohol and tobacco, and also no second thing about the American legal system.

To Drug Street's credit, it does something that almost no anti-drug media of this era managed: it explains why people do them. "Sometimes you just don't fit, everything you do seems like it's wrong," Craig explains. "When I do a line, it doesn't matter anymore. And you know how when you get around someone you like and don't know how to act? Cocaine makes it easy. It makes everything easy."

Holy shit. Real fucking talk from Craig. I mean, cocaine doesn't make everything easier, but since I don't want to get into the idea of a middle schooler with ED, let's move on — just like Craig does from our narrative after introducing Jill to California Cornflakes.

One hit is all it takes. Jill is now the real Detective Comics character Snowflame, who I didn't make up and is not a joke. Worse, she immediately breaks the number one rule of doing cocaine as a hot girl: don't buy it yourself. And before you say anything about how talking about a middle schooler being hot is kind of weird, don't worry — Jill is portrayed by Joleen Lutz, who was actually thirty years old at the time of filming. I mean, we're not going to show actual children simulating hard drug use. Can you imagine?

Jill immediately finds a dealer, and I love this scene of him opening up a little jewelry box to produce a vial of coke on what looks like the set of Seventh Heaven. It's shot so that it almost appears romantic, if it weren't for Jill whipping out her cash while her hands tremble with the excitement of a contemporary SNL writer who just churned out a sketch calling for Dana Carvey to play a Chinese man.

We get a montage of Jill's rapid decline, which kind of just looks like taking off her makeup and changing her hairstyle until she appears to be a normal thirty year old woman.

Jill argues with her mom, steals from her friends, and pawns off her possessions to get more Vitamin C. Possibly someone has called it that before. But one day she finds that the price has gone up, and she doesn't get her allowance until next week! Her dealer, who seems like a pretty decent guy as far as these things go, offers her PCP, mushrooms, LSD, and weed. But only the burning fire of cocaine can sustain Jill's superpowers of doing tremendous amounts of cocaine.

"Maybe there's another way you can pay," Jill's dealer says, and we immediately brace for the obvious sex trafficking subplot. But Drug Street refuses to go that dark. Sex doesn't exist in this universe — that's a whole different PSA. Instead, the dealer likes Jill's necklace. She's torn about it, but ultimately the memory of her beloved grandmother weighs less heavily on her heart than a few grams of coke.

Jill blasts through her eight ball like Steve Johnson working on Ghostbusters, only she doesn't get a cocaine-induced hallucination of John Belushi who inspires her to invent Slimer. All she gets is the realization that she's out of cocaine. She does the only sensible thing under the circumstances: goes to her medicine cabinet and begins stuffing random pills into her face.

This is her personal medicine cabinet in her room, mind you, so she's probably slamming allergy meds and expired antibiotics. Maybe she's just trying to get some rest, take the edge off the comedown?

No, she was trying to fucking kill herself. Maybe? It's unclear. I assumed she'd just passed out until the camera began pulling back and dramatic piano music began playing. Cause of death: Flintstones chewable vitamins.

Finally, we arrive at our third grim tale, narrated by Felipe. Jill went cold and smug in her telling, Eddie with the overeager directness of a young child. Felipe's actor plays it mournful. He is a solemn angel cursed to watch but never able to intercede. You might be interested to know that this wasn't his last role related to narcotics, either. Felipe was played by Raymond Cruz, who is better known today as Tuco Salamanca on Breaking Bad.

I never saw that, but maybe the drug stuff goes better for him in it? I think it usually went pretty well for everyone on that show.

Back to Eddie. He's played by Adam Jeffries, who was 12 at the time of filming. Drug Street presents him as a smart kid, into science and computers. But one day, as he's walking home with two of his friends under the sullen, ghostly gaze of Felipe, one of them invites him over to "show him something."

This is the '80s, so the sky's the limit on what that could be. A new Nintendo tape, a Masters of the Universe playset, a weathered copy of Penthouse someone found in the woods. I guess, though, that it could also be drugs. Is it drugs?

It's drugs.

"This is crack," the white child tells Eddie and his other black friend. "And this is what you smoke it in."

No way. We're not going to do the Little Rascals Smoke Crack, are we? Really? We didn't show the car crash or even imply an exchange of drugs for sexual favors, but we're going to depict these children freebasing?

Absolutely we are. Felipe weeps.

Eddie's resolve crumbles like so much baking powder in the face of his friend's insistence that his brother smokes crack all the time and isn't hooked. And the crack belongs to this kid's mother, which means that up to two thirds of this family are dope fiends. It's tragic, the movie seems to be saying, the way that drugs destroy families.

But hold on. For the child of a family where at least two of the other members smoke crack on a regular basis, Eddie's pal is surprisingly clean and well-groomed. I'm not saying that taking care of your kids is incompatible with an addiction to hard drugs — I mean, Elon Musk manages to do it. But something isn't quite right with this picture. This white child has called his two black friends over to his house to "show them" crack. He insists that it's fine, that nothing bad will happen from doing it.

Troubling. Eddie heads home and immediately begins freaking out. His mom suspects something. He retreats to his graph paper nerd realm and calls up his friend, who tells him he just needs to do a little more to "even himself out."

I think I see the angle here, the desire to avoid unseemly stereotyping by making the white kid the source of the drugs. But I do not believe that this is the advice of a well-meaning, drug-addicted child. No. This is the final step in a diabolical plan by members of the Junior CIA to hook suburban black kids on crack cocaine.

It works, too: Eddie manifests some crack out of nowhere and spends what seems like hours in the bathroom hitting the rock.

He sits down for dinner with his parents later, having "evened out." Can you guess how this ends?

He fucking dies, obviously. His little heart had an undiagnosed whoopsie.

The kids try to summarize what we've learned and we go to credits. That's it. Surely there's nothing completely insane there. Remember, don't drive crossfaded, never pay for coke if you're attractive, and always have a full medical workup before hotboxing your bathroom with crack.

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