Marijuana and Heroin: "The Terrible Truth" 1951 Sid Davis Productions (Patreon)

more at http://quickfound.net/

CASE HISTORY TEENAGE GIRL'S INTRODUCTION TO USE OF NARCOTICS & PERSONAL & SOCIAL PROBLEMS THAT RESULT. BEGINNING W/OCCASIONAL MARIJUANA CIGARETTE, SHE EXPERIMENTS W/HEROIN & ACQUIRES CRIMINAL RECORD IN EFFORT TO SECURE MONEY TO SATISFY DRUG CRAVINGS.

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terrible_Truth

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Terrible Truth is a 1951 American anti-drug documentary film created by Sid Davis Productions. The film contained messages such as "marijuana has similar properties to amphetamines and the Soviet Union was pushing drugs in America".  The film follows William B. McKesson (to become Los Angeles County District Attorney in 1956) who interviews a young woman about her use of marijuana as a gateway drug to intravenous use of heroin. McKesson states at the end of the film "Some say that the Reds are promoting drug traffic in the United States to undermine national morale."

The film has been called "faux documentary ... ironic, naïve, campy", and according to Edwdard Brunner in Postmodern Culture, one of the "scandalous examples of how thoroughly the media environment has been penetrated by schemes for social engineering". It can be found alongside famously bad movies like Reefer Madness on popular film lists, for example those found at thefix.com as one of the five worst anti-drug works of the past century, and The Atlantic where it is described as "hysterical" and "cartoonish"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Davis

Sidney "Sid" Davis (April 1, 1916 – October 16, 2006) was an American director and producer who specialized in social guidance films...

In November 1949 Linda Joyce Glucoft, a six-year-old girl in Los Angeles, California, was molested and murdered by a man named Fred Stroble. The story made front-page news in the Los Angeles Times for a week as police and the FBI searched for Stroble. The story was picked up by Time Magazine and other national media, and led to a flurry of reported rapes and attempted rapes. Some media began to speculate that the supposed epidemic of rape was simply media manipulation of public perception.

Davis stated that the tragedy particularly disturbed him because his then-six-year-old daughter Jill did not seem to pay attention to his warnings about strangers. Davis talked to John Wayne saying that a film about this should be made, and Wayne suggested that Davis make the film. Wayne gave Davis $1,000 ($10745.45 when adjusted for inflation) and used the money to make his first film, The Dangerous Stranger, a film he would remake at least twice over the next 30 years. The film tells the story of several young children—some of the children are kidnapped and eventually saved, others are kidnapped and never seen again. Davis used schoolchildren and police officers instead of professional actors. Peter L. Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle said "[t]he film was a success among schools and police departments".

Davis sold copies of the film to schools and police departments, reaping a $250,000 profit. He used the money to make more than 150 films over the next few decades. Davis' films are typically 10 to 30 minutes long; he prided himself on making each one for $1,000, a minuscule film budget even at that time. Due to the content of his films, people referred to him as the "King of Calamity".

His films cover topics such as driver safety, marijuana use, heroin addiction, and gang warfare. Live and Learn (1956), a fairly famous Davis film, features Jill cutting out paper dolls in her room. When her father comes home she jumps up to greet him, trips on the carpet, and impales herself on the scissors. Other children in the film are equally unlucky—falling off cliffs, being run over by cars, or losing vision in one eye from flying shards of glass...