In 1986’s The Drug Knot, Dermot Mulroney plays a high school student.
At the time this show aired, Dermot Mulroney was 25 years-old and he looked like he was 30 but, looks aside, he actually gives a pretty convincing performance as Doug Dawson. Doug is a smart and musically-gifted high school senior. He’s talented enough to make beautiful music with a saxophone and rebellious enough to skip class so that he can play the sax in the school locker room. His girlfriend, Kim (Meryl Streep look-alike Kim Myers), is totally in love with Doug but she also worries that he’s getting too heavily into dugs. He’s gone from smoking weed to snorting cocaine. He hides his drugs in his bedroom. His mother (Mary Ellen Trainor) has no idea that Doug is a drug addict while Doug’s little brother (David Faustino) wants to be just like him.
Can you see where this is heading?
In order to combat the school’s growing drug problem, the school has invited a speaker named David Toma to give a speech at a school assembly. Toma is a former cop who struggled with addiction himself. He inspired not one but two television shows, one called Toma and the other called Baretta. He goes from school to school and he gives speeches about all of the teenagers that he knows who have died as a result of doing drugs. As we see throughout the episode, Toma is a confrontational speaker, one who is not afraid to yell at his audience. Doug shows up for the assembly but his bad attitude leads to Toma kicking him out.
Personally, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the idea of trying to change people’s behavior by yelling at them. I know that it’s a popular technique and there’s been a lot of television shows (Intervention and Beyond Scared Straight come to mind) that are all about getting in people’s faces and screaming at them. My feeling, though, has always been that this approach is more about making other people feel good than actually changing behavior. Everyone wants to see the people who have caused them stress get yelled at. On talk shows, audiences would applaud whenever a disrespectful teen got sent to boot camp but it’s rare that you ever heard about whether or not the approach actually worked. I mean, I assume the approach works for some people but I know that if someone yells at me not to do something, my usual reaction is to go ahead do it just because I resent authority. David Toma’s approach would not have worked with me.
(One interesting thing about The Drug Knot is that David Toma is a real person and he plays himself. Apparently, he’s still out there and still at it, even though he’s in his 90s now. I should note that, on YouTube, there’s a lot of comments from people who say that getting yelled at by David Toma saved their lives so maybe the yelling approach does work for more people than I assumed.)
Anyway, as always when it comes to these made-for-TV anti-drug programs, the drugs lead to tragedy and The Drug Knot ends on a particular dark note. For once, there is no redemption.
Here is The Drug Knot, complete with an anti-drug message from Michael Jordan:
Through the Shattered Lens 