Drugs Are Bad/Playing With: Difference between revisions

'''Basic Trope''': The use of drugs is portrayed in a manner that plays up their negative effects and downplays their positive ones, usually for the sake of setting up and delivering [[An Aesop]] against drug use.

* '''Straight''': Billy smokes a joint, and starts ignoring his schoolwork and committing petty thefts. His parents find out, and Billy delivers [[An Aesop]] about how drugs ruin lives.

* '''Justified''': Billy becomes overpowered by his drug use in the way that he does in the straight example, but his doctor explains that it only had such a profound effect on him because of his pre-existing psychological imbalances.

* '''Inverted''': Billy's brother Jimmy has suicidal depression which suddenly dissapears when he takes a pill, and does not come back even when its effects wear off; drugs are subsequently portrayed as the ideal, consequence-free solution to all his problems.

* '''Subverted''': Billy drinks ten beers, borrows his father's car, and crashes it into a lamp-post. It's then revealed that the beer was non-alcoholic.

* '''Double Subverted''': ...though the joint he was smoking at the time was quite potent indeed.

* '''Reconstructed''': ...but when the kids confront the parents about these lies, the parents deliver quite a reasonable [[Aesop]] about why children should stay away from drugs.

* '''Zig Zagged''': When Billy takes drugs, he drives into a tree and ends up hospitalized. Except that it turns out they were fake. But then he finds out that the coffee he drank afterward was spiked. And then he learns that his accident was actually engineered by his arch-nemesis to try to kill him, and only his unbalanced mindset stopped him from behaving [[Batman Gambit|exactly how they predicted]].