Movies dramatize everything. From simple romance to shootouts to personal feuds to breakups.
They also over-dramatize drugs and their usage. Most of the effects they show are not what the real drug symptoms actually are – they are either exaggerated or trivialized. Sometimes they are mixed, for example, a woman takes marijuana and starts hallucinating like she is on LSD.
And the most popular of it all – drinking coffee after a night of alcohol revelry and killing the hangover in an instant – something that does not happen.
Let’s take a look at the most common guffaws movies do with drugs and their effects.
1. Getting over addiction in one night – happened in Udta Punjab too.
The addict has been taking heroin, Vicodin and snorting cocaine for all his/her adult life and it takes them just one hell of a night to get over their addiction. They puke, they gasp for air, they sweat and they suffer.
And in the morning, it is all OK!
The truth is detoxing takes months and years even. It is a long-term struggle – not a one night scuffle.
2. Marijuana makes you lazy for life after you smoke it once/twice
It really does not. Statistics say that half the population of USA has smoked up at least once in their lives – including successful people like Barack Obama, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Feynman.
That is, provided, if you smoked it just once/twice and are not a serial abuser.
3. You can drink the alcohol directly from the bottle and be OK
Even if you are a hardcore drinker, you know that you just cannot drink it right from the bottle – even the hardcore drinkers do not do that. One, because you just cannot enjoy liquor like that.
Secondly, that is the best way to start puking, however much of a pro you are. You just cannot drink like that.
4. Heroin dilates the pupils
Heroin actually makes your senses acute, thereby contracting the pupils, and not dilating them, as popularly shown in movies where your pupils dilate after the protagonist injects himself.
5. Getting drunk on alcohol after a single sip and passing out after 5 minutes
Usually, alcohol takes more than 30 minutes to get into your bloodstream. That is when it gets you tipsy. What we see in movies is that people get tipsy within 5 minutes – like punch drunk.
Something that does not happen.
6. Marijuana gives you hallucinations and makes you hyperactive
To exaggerate, people who have taken marijuana become energetic, run around a lot, do cartwheels and hallucinate – they start seeing things that are not there.
These symptoms do not exist after taking marijuana. Marijuana makes people lethargic and directors and scriptwriters often get mistaken of this, and make the actors do stuff that should happen after taking Acid or Cocaine.
7. Natural drugs are not bad
Marijuana and Shrooms have this perception of being a drug that is not as bad as LSD or cocaine. Marijuana is the cool drug and is completely OK to be smoked every day. The same is the case with Mushrooms – just a period of weird hallucinations and the next day is all OK.
Mushrooms are as bad as LSD. Just because they are natural does not make them completely fine to smoke up. There is also this great problem with marijuana that everyone ignores – farmers spray insecticides on them.
But like normal crops, that are have to cleaned on the farmer’s end because of rules, marijuana is not regulated.
You could be smoking up a lot of DDT with that THC.
8. Drug addicts are always easy to spot
Hollow darkened eyes, superthin, balding head and pale skin – every drug user in every movie.
Yes, meth and cocaine abusers do look like that. But normal hash and sleeping pill addicts look completely normal and behave like perfectly socially adjusted individuals – except when their drugs are taken away.
9. Chloroform knocks you out. For hours.
You must have seen the scene in which a kidnapper just puts a rag soaked with chloroform on the victim’s nose and BAM! the victim is knocked out flat.
In reality, the kidnapper would have to keep the rag on the victim for a solid 10 minutes before the victim could be remotely unconscious.
And he would need to keep the victim inhaling chloroform for an extended period of time to keep the victim under.
10. You have to hit rock bottom to get out of the habit
Every drug movie shows that the only way to get out of addiction is when you hit rock bottom – after coughing blood in alcoholism, after frothing from the mouth and getting spasms in Cocaine and passing out in your own vomit after Heroin.
No movie shows the person coming out of the habit right after he/she indulges in it at the start.