Subject Was Drugs, and Gathering Saw and Heard a Sobering Message
Elegant in black tie and glitter gowns, they spoke in hushed tones of their own encounters with the nightmare of drugs:
“My daughter’s girlfriend just got off cocaine,” confided one woman before Monday night’s premiere of “Nightmare on Drug Street,” an anti-drug video produced by the Search Foundation of Orange County.
“I thought I was going to lose my child to drugs, but he’s back , thank God,” said another.
“I have friends who have gone through drug abuse,” said the video’s director, Traci Donat, daughter of singer Helen Reddy. “As well as one very close family member. It’s very painful to watch that self-destructive behavior. This was my way of trying to help.”
More than 200 supporters of the Search Foundation, founded in 1986 by Beverly Thompson of Newport Beach, assembled at the Registry Hotel to rub elbows over cocktails and soda pop (this crowd’s preferred beverage), dine on a lavish buffet, then sit in a darkened ballroom to watch the 22-minute video.
“I’ll be in the hospital tomorrow morning,” Thompson laughingly told guests. “Look for me in a padded cell.”
She was only half kidding. “It’s been a long, painful struggle to make this film,” Thompson said, sipping Diet Pepsi in a de luxe hotel suite before joining guests. “It’s hard to believe it,” Thompson said. “But there are many people who don’t want a film of this nature distributed. Drug money is powerful in any community where there is affluence.”
The foundation’s goal in 1986, Thompson said, was to raise funds to create a free video on drug education for the nation’s fifth- and sixth-graders. “And we’ve done it,” she said. The video was recently completed at a cost of about $70,000. “The next step is to duplicate it and distribute it to every public elementary school in the country.”
Funds for duplication and distribution will be procured through corporate sponsorships, Thompson said. “And the Search Foundation will pick up the difference.” (At the conclusion of the evening, a note was passed to Thompson as she stood at the podium, informing her that Sid Sheinberg, president of Universal Studios--where the video was filmed--had arranged to have the duplication costs donated by AME, a Hollywood-based editing and duplication house.)
Thompson’s boyfriend, Bob Bucci, wrote the story line for the docudrama, which contains three separate scenarios: one about marijuana and alcohol abuse, another that spotlights cocaine addiction, and one that deals with crack experimentation.
“We broke it up into three parts to hold the children’s interest,” said Bucci, a landscape architect from Newport Beach. “We wanted it to be shorter, but we just had too much we wanted to say.”
“It has always seemed strange to me,” Thompson said, “that there weren’t any films around to educate little children about drugs. Oh, there has been loads of information available about drug rehab centers, that sort of thing.
“But they all seemed like efforts to just put Band-Aids on the problem.”
After the screening--during which you could have heard a pin drop--guests applauded with gusto.
“It was absolutely fantastic,” said Gail Showalter, eyes red from weeping over the portrayal of a teen who died from a drug overdose. “The children in the video were about the same age as my own.
“As I watched it, I thought: ‘It takes just one moment for kids to succumb to peer pressure and lose everything.’
“I hope and pray my children will keep their self-esteem, stay strong. I would love to have had them sitting right there in the front row tonight.”