shanmonster | Being Schooled on Drugs

Spurred by an article I read about a kindergartener who brought in his mom's pipe and baggies of crystal meth for show and tell, I suddenly remembered something I experienced in early elementary school. My school was having a special assembly so a police constable could talk to us about drugs. We watched a video on the evils of smoking. It was scary and cool. I wanted to watch it again and again. A giant anthropomorphized cigarette package chugged up and down hallways spewing huge clouds of smoke and making the noises of a nightmarish locomotive. People were coughing with strenuous violence. X-rays of lungs and hunks of diseased mystery meat appeared in lurid, glistening black and white.

After the projector stopped, the police officer went to the front of the gym. He had a table with all sorts of bags on it. He started talking about different drugs, and showed us examples of them, each time. Yes, he had cocaine, hashish, and marijuana with him. Some of the smart-ass kids asked for samples, and they were sent to the principal's office.

Something tells me cops don't bring actual drugs to show and tell at schools, anymore.

The funny thing is, where I lived ended up becoming the major drop point for Colombian drugs in the northeast. Every Friday, a small plane would fly past my house and drop a package, and an hour or so later, a man and his teenaged son would drive a beaten-up pickup truck up the hill past my house, drive out into the fields where the package had fallen, and then drive away again. This driving happened regularly, no matter what the weather. The truck even came out during a blizzard, and went off the road. When the driver was asked why he was driving in such weather, he claimed he was teaching his son how to drive in the winter. Some of the kids from the elementary and high school would distribute the drugs in the change-rooms--not for themselves, but for further distribution in the Maritimes (and maybe Quebec, too. Not sure.).

I think the pilots were caught in a village not too far from where I lived. I can't remember the details, and my Google-fu is failing me, so I can't find any links on it. The pilots may have had engine trouble and landed at the small airstrip. I do know that the trial was big news at the time. This would have been in the early 1990s, I think, or possibly 1989. In any case, while the Colombians were in the jail and courthouse, Fredericton was full of armed cops. Sharpshooters were on the rooftops downtown, in case of a Hollywood-style jail bust, I guess.

It was all terribly exciting.