Tuesday, April 15, 2008


Joe Bonomo: Straight Dope


DON’T BE A DOPE
Facts About Narcotics
By Joe Bonomo and his staff of experts
64 pages; Bonomo Pocket Manuals (1966)


Pull up a chair. Hollywood stuntman, body builder, and health expert Joe Bonomo wants to give you the dope on dope.

Of course, Joe’s observations were made over four decades ago, but truth never changes, especially when it comes to the dope racket.

Opium, heroin, and marihuana – all the same; they’ll kill ya. It’s been proven that marihuana leads to harder stuff. By itself it’s bad. Examinations of reefer addicts prove that the drug can shrink a brain as much as ten percent.

But what’s the solution to stopping the narcotics epidemic? One answer: Early sex education.

Improper sex training can cause kids to grow up to be troubled adults. A messed up adult is a prime target for an unscrupulous peddler. Narcotics easily push the user into a helpless decline, the slippery slope of drug orgies, loose morals, venereal disease, bad teeth –- and then death. That dynamic duo -- morality and clean living -- have to be installed at a young age.

Take Johnny. He’s two years old. His parents take the right approach when it comes to sex. He’s been told the proper names of his body parts like penis and anus. He doesn’t “wee wee” or “go to pottie chair;” he urinates and has a bowel movement.

But one day Mother finds Johnny on the toilet, playing with his wee-wee – I mean, penis. The proud young boy says he can tickle his penis and make it big.

But Mother simply says that Johnny shouldn’t make his penis big or it will get sore. He should only hold it when urinating but at all other times leave it alone.

After all, Mother doesn’t want Johnny jerking off – I mean masturbating. Prolonged masturbation causes impotence in adult men by congesting the urethra. This means examination and treatment by a doctor.

To prevent such an embarrassing situation later in his life, Mother makes sure Johnny sleeps with lightweight covers, hands out in view.

And she makes sure to keep Johnny busy when he’s awake. As Joe Bonomo observes: “Oftentimes children play with themselves because they have nothing better to do.”

But Johnny is too young to really understand any of this, even when he’s six years old. At that age he might urinate outside, too busy playing (not with himself) to use indoor plumbing. Johnny must be told that only dogs urinate on trees. If he keeps urinating outside, then “he will have to be fed on the back porch with the other dogs.”

Of course, all of this sounds drastic. Especially when Mother tracks Johnny’s genital health and cleanliness, checking for a long, tight foreskin or pinworms in the rectum.

Such loving devotion by Mother will make Johnny a normal boy. He will grow up right, never becoming a narcotics user.

On his wedding night he’ll have to tell his new bride that she can’t touch his penis or she will make it sore.





Various images from the chapter, “Early Sex Education,” from DON’T BE A DOPE By Joe Bonomo.

2 comments:

X. Dell said...

The "Cutting Edge/Something Weird" section of my OnDemand has a section that plays all of these "educational" films from the 1950s and 1960s, and they frequently deal with these topics in ways that are either asinine, incorrect (judged by what we know from future studies), or just plain over the top.

I've seen cautionary books from that period on such things as communism, facism and other political movements, and some of them don't sound quite so lame today as those dealing with sex and drugs. Kinda makes you wonder if we're more screwed up drug-wise, sex-wise, or politics-wise these days.

Ray Palm (Ray X) said...

X. Dell:

History does have a way of repeating itself. But people never learn. After the Vietnam war, one would think the public wouldn't have fallen for another dead end conflict.

There are always those who don't believe what they preach. They lead others on for selfish, not altruistic, reasons. That said, I think that Joe Bonomo meant well, he believed in his message, but he got parts of it wrong.

Ray