[Male 1:] People try to revive me.
[Male 2:] It seems like I've been a problem child ever since I started using.
A heck of a life. I don't know how to really tell it, you know.
[Images of tubes of glue accompanied by drum roll]
[Narrator:] These men and women, all of them, are addicts.
They're at this rehabilitation center maintained by the State of California
for treatment and possible first-stage control of their sickness.
Addiction to narcotics, you see, is a sickness.
Unchecked, it can be fatal. Don't let the way they look fool you.
They didn't look like this...
they didn't act like this, on the outside, when they were busted.
[Police sirens and car horns sound]
Some were arrested for possession of narcotics
ranging from pills to marijuana to heroin.
Some were literally picked up off the street for addiction to barbiturates [?].
Some were arrested for pushing, selling,
and many were arrested for theft, forgery, and other crimes
to get money to buy drugs to support their habit.
[A young woman accosts another woman in a grocery store parking lot and steals her purse.]
How do they start on the road that leads to institutions like this?
And to emergency wards, prisons, and often to death?
Why do they begin using narcotics?
Some of them even before they reach junior high school. Why?
[Female 1:] I started using narcotics because I heard other people talk about them,
and I thought it was something great and I wanted to try it out.
[Male 2:] At this time I was introduced to barbiturates,
and drinking excessively.
It was just a lot of kicks and nothing of any meaning, you know,
and the school that I attended...it was a very negative body of fellows there.
So I haven't been a success in school, and them feeling the same way.
We had something in common.
[Female 2:] I think the reason why I started using narcotics was an acceptance and, I don't know,
I didn't have any brothers and sisters that were close to me.
I was considered actually the baby of the family.
And I felt my parents didn't understand me and I felt that these people did.
[Male 1:] When I did use narcotics, I guess it made me feel like a big man, you know,
big man in a crowd.
[Female 3:] I was 16 when I started taking, smoking weed, and dropping pills,
and it made me feel security, you know,
made me feel like no one could get close to me and I liked the feeling.
[Female 4:] I was so disappointed that I just said "later" to everything.
And I went out and did heroin and within three or four months I was hooked.
[Male 3:] When I was 14 years old, I was running around with a friend of mine.
This guy was older than I was, about three years older than I was,
and he was smoking marijuana and he introduced it to me.
He asked me to try it and I tried it because I looked up to the guy.
He was older than I was and it seemed like he was having a lot more fun and excitement.
[Narrator:] They hope to have more fun, more kicks,
to gain acceptance, to achieve security.
They hope to forget their troubles, bury their feelings.
For hopes like these, they break the law and risk their lives every day,
[A young man appears to be a public bathroom, searching for drugs hidden there.]
sniffing glue, blowing pot, dropping pills, shooting heroin.
[He lights a match to a drug set-up with spoon and cup.]
For what?
[Female 2:] When I drop pills, I find myself falling over tables, down stairs,
running into walls and if I had enough pills I would try to drive a car,
and I've got in quite a few wrecks.
You don't have any fear of hurting yourself or others.
[Male 1:] Myself and my friends used to usually go over to the park or something like that,
and sniff at the park and have a good time.
What we didn't realize at the time was the consequences of what we were doing.
Myself, I know three or four people that have been in the hospital
because of the effects of glue.
Sometimes from kidney trouble,
and your thoughts are disorganized from brain damage.
[Male 3:] I was always leery of everybody, you know,
I didn't particularly want to meet nobody new
because I didn't particularly trust nobody.
I'd steadily be looking around and watching who you're with.
[Female 5:] I started smoking weed and then taking the pills,
but I knew that there was something better.
So I started using heroin and any other opiate I could find, I just wanted to try.
Even after I used heroin, I wanted something bigger and better, you know.
I think that's why I kept wanting more because it never made me actually escape
or forget about what I was wanting or forget about anything.
This has all happened to me pretty fast. I'm only 21 now,
and I feel kind of tired within myself.
[Male 2:] Well, the group of men, fellows, that I ran around with,
some are dead, some are in the penitentiary,
some are still going to county jails back and forth.
They're just not doing too well.
[Male 4:] I used to get up out of bed and just take my daily dosage.
One Saturday I was under the influence of [?] never wore off,
I was constantly under the influence.
I seemed to have a need for more and more.
[Male 5:] I was 18. I was introduced to heroin by a friend of mine,
so-called friend, and I don't know, things at that time just seemed to fall.
Everything I had built up in the last two or three years, which wasn't much,
but what I had built up just fell, just all at once.
I lost my job and all the people that I had respect for
and they had respect for me, I lost every bit of that.
[Female 3:] When you get hooked, it's really a drag because pretty soon the heroin doesn't
get you loaded
unless you really shoot a lot and it gets more expensive,
and you've got to go out and hustle up some money.
Either checks, stealing, burglaries, you know,
there's many ways to get money.
And pretty soon you don't even want to go out
and get any money for yourself and you just lay there and vegetate.
You don't, you don't go to parties anymore,
you don't have any fun, you don't do things.
You don't live. You're just nothing.
[Male 5:] This time that I got picked up for using narcotics it was a little bit harder.
You find that the police enforcement officer is against the pusher
only because of the fact they destroy people, mostly young teenagers
because they are the ones that are weakest.
You could push to them and they'll [?].
[Music]
[Female 4:] Well, when I realized I was hooked on heroin,
then I knew that I was just spending money to feel normal like a non-user would feel.
So I was really just spending money for nothing.
[Male 6:] I was using drugs, bennies, barbiturates...
and I got up to the point where I would drop up to 50 pills a day
and think nothing of it.
There've been times I've gone into a coma for two days.
I would be at a house with a little party going on or something
and black out and maybe day and a half or two days before I would wake up.
I've had memory lapses. I've found myself a few times somewhere
and I didn't realize how I got there or what I was doing.
I guess that's about all I lived for.
After a while you just forget that the world exists.
All you know is your own little world of dope.
[Narrator:] The world of dope is a sick world.
Easy to enter but hard, incredibly hard to leave.
Throughout the United States, the figures are grim.
Of those people treated for narcotics addiction at federal hospitals,
no more than six percent are cured;
94 percent use narcotics again within the next six months.
They are hooked forever until they die.
[Male 7:] When I was out there on the streets using,
I really didn't stop to take a look at myself,
why I was using or what it was doing to me or anything like this.
And I can see now where it's ruined my whole life.
I'm 32 years old and I don't have anything.
[Male 2:] I'm going to try and make it as hard as I can.
I know that it will be hard, but I'm willing to give it a try.
[Female 3:] Something I didn't know when I was out there,
because I had never been busted and locked up for any length of time,
and that's my freedom.
I feel like my freedom is more important than fixing.
[Male 5:] I want too much out of life to keep on shooting narcotics and ruining,
it just ruins it completely.
[Female 4:] Now that I'm off heroin, I feel like that it's just a nice feeling
to be able to wake up in the morning and be hungry and want to eat breakfast
rather than have to get up and fix.
It's pure misery.
[Narrator:] Addiction to narcotics is misery.
The addict locks himself into a mental and physical prison
from which escapes are few and far between.
So, what's with narcotics? Yes or no?
To the young men and women who appeared in this film,
the answer is obvious.
Now.
[Handcuffs clink as they are placed on a drug user's wrists and he is led away.]
[Dramatic music swells then lowers to a thrumming sound.]