BS Free Guide to Drugs - Part 1

This is very rough as was filmed and edited on a mid of VHS and SVHS analogue video in the mid nighties during the rave years that included the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill that outlawed the free party rave culture as well as the DIY culture of the likes of the Luton Exodus Collective with founding members such as Glenn Jenkins. This was when parents of our millennials generation where teenagers themselves and shows what utter hypocrites they are now when they refer to teenagers as children considering what they got up to and how they lived their lives as adolescents themselves. The research also included attending the corinors enquiry for a girl called Leah Betts who at the the time was used in a big anti ecstasy campaign.

At this time ecstasy use was at its peak along with other drug use and most drug education was utterly dire of the be nerdy no life virgin boring goodie goodie two shoes variety, horror stories or very dull information that in no way related to the young back then.

The concept I came up with was to come up with a very honest approach, that featured:

• Young people, users, clubbers, club and rave culture, hippies, festival goers, addicts/ex - addicts.
• Said things exactly as they were, hence BS as in Bull Shit Free Guide. The good, bad, dangerous, safe, beneficial and not.
• It was absolutely NOT what would now be deemed appropriate or PC.
• It that encourages young people (Yup parents of this current generation) to go out, have fun, but reduce the harm they risked by getting clued up with accurate info and directed to the best sources of information which back then was : The Lifeline Project and the graphic literature of Michael Linnell Publications, Drugscope, the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependency

• It was deliberately anti-authoritarian including how to deal with police if caught with drugs, full of swearing and all things that would now be deemed so called 'Inappropriate' in including how drugs affect sex lives, political, anarchic, with footage from lots of films.
  
  
•  In fact the marketing and distribution concept was to deliberately pick a fight with the likes of the Sun and Daily Mail, to have them attack the video then ‘leak’ thousands of videos to students to pass around schools like previous forbidden underground  videos ‘Animal farm’ and ‘Faces of Death’ that everyone was trying to get hold of the infamous and mythical videos in the 80s. Thus instead of telling students you must see this, having them want to see what the fuss was all about and thinking they were getting one over the oldies.
  
  
•  Short shots for short attention spans.
  
  
•  Very colourful with lots of cool music of the time and I found out another far better funded project shared many of the same values towards the end. This video was called 'Out of My Head'.
  
  
• Unfortunately the project mushroom clouded into something way too big, expensive, long, and needing far more help than I could get as a broke student at what was then Southampton Solent University. I only got to make very roughly a very small part of the video, but learned an awful lot during the research stage including super effective ddiction cure Ibogaine.