Educational Media Reviews Online

Human Relations Media has new trio of drug education curriculum kits; each kit contains a documentary style video and an educator’s workbook. The kits, New Club Drugs: Designed for Death, Abusing Over-The-Counter Drugs and Legal but Deadly: Abusing Prescription Drugs, are aimed at junior high through college aged young adults, and they discuss the known and unknown dangers of drug abuse. The videos feature commentary from health experts, parents with affected children and adolescents who themselves have abused drugs. The videos’ approach is not quite “scared straight,” but they do provide a vast amount of factual, yet accessible, information about the types of prescription, over-the-counter and club drugs that are readily available and possibly lethal when misused. The detailed accounts of the body’s reactions to these drugs, and the possible other side effects such as car accidents and criminal behavior, are frightening and should make young adults think twice about consumption. The videos also feature personal accounts from former substance abusers and their families, which provide the emotional component of the intended messages.

The videos by themselves are not extraordinary, but coupled with the workbooks, the kits become exceptionally effective and informative. Each workbook contains and introduction, learning objectives, a program summary, a wide assortment of fact sheets and a good selection of student activities, designed to reinforce what has been learned. There is some content overlap between two of the videos, Legal but Deadly and New Club Drugs, but the workbooks do contain different information. Any of these kits would be useful and provide an educator with ample information for a lesson or unit about drug abuse. The films are closed captioned, and well edited; the video and audio qualities are also of good quality. New Club Drugs: Designed for Death, Abusing Over-The-Counter Drugs and Legal but Deadly: Abusing Prescription Drugs are recommended and best suited for school libraries and academic curriculum libraries.