Since 1987, the Beit T’Shuvah thrift store in Culver City has been “a high-end, charity-run resale store that supports Beit T’shuvah, a drug/alcohol rehab in Los Angeles,” as described on their Google profile. The store places emphasis on the value of charity, hiring primarily recovering addicts in its storefront. Over Thanksgiving, I visited the store only to find that it was involved in a confusing partnership with the Church of Scientology.
While shopping at the store, I purchased a documentary called “The Truth About Drugs.” I was drawn in by its garish cover and D.A.R.E. moralism—according to the back of the DVD, meth is normally made from “battery acid and rat poison.” Frankly, I thought watching it would make a good laugh, along with the other documentary I got that would walk me through surviving singlehood as a Christian woman. As a documentary, “The Truth About Drugs” is unsurprisingly lackluster. The film lacks any narrative structure, playing like a series of interviews with real people, not actors, lit with an ominous green filter. The documentary makes outrageous claims about the nature of drug use; it claims that marijuana leads to crack and heroin, or even that sniffing glue is a common adult method of inhaling drugs—but even the absurdity of the documentary’s claims couldn’t make it stand out. Instead, it blended into the memory miasma of every other scared-straight anti-drug documentary I’ve ever been forced to watch…