DRUGS ARE FOR DUMMIES

Drummer For Rock Group Crash Test Dummies Has Fun Way To Give Serious
Message To Local Students

Mitch Dorge, drummer for the rock group Crash Test Dummies, has an
unusual approach to drug prevention.

Rather than telling Lakeport and Eden high school students not to do
drugs, Dorge took the reverse route: he read them a recipe for crystal meth.

Red devil's lye. Four bottles of iodine. Rubbing alcohol. Hydrogen
peroxide. ("And for any bleached blonds out there, you know what that
does.") The muscle-warming lotion A5-35. Four books of matches to
crumble the flammable ends into the mix. All of this is ingested. "I
would like to think all of you or most of you would not voluntarily
put this stuff into your body," Dorge said Wednesday. The proceeding
six paragraphs of instructions "do not contain a period or comma.
Most of the words are misspelled. This person thinks three goes into
two one time."

Dorge spoke at Lakeport and Governor Simcoe in the latest stop of his
Life Choices campaign, which encourages positive energy and healthy
goals in high school students. Dorge uses his experiences with Crash
Test Dummies, whose hits included Superman's Song and Mmm Mmm Mmm
Mmm, to segue into topics such as what drugs do to the brain.

Not that he's going to preach, he told the students.

"I'm not one of these people who will say, 'Drugs are bad. Drugs will
kill you,' " he said. But "if anybody is willing to take the time to
educate themselves ever so slightly, I believe they make difference decisions."

If any students are interested in making crystal meth, Dorge added,
there is a 40 per cent chance their faces will be blown off.

"Forty per cent of meth labs blow up," he said. "And when they blow
up, they blow up into the face of the person cooking it. If you guys
lived in Madison, Wisconsin, and woke up in the middle of the night
and were burned in a fire, it would take between one and three days
for them to help you because the burn units are full of morons who've
blown themselves up in meth labs."

Mike Thompson, vice-principal of Lakeport, had seen Dorge's
performance and jumped at the chance to bring him to Lakeport. The
appearance was sponsored by The Co-operators insurance company.

"It's an energetic presentation which targets the major pressures
kids are facing," Thompson said. "But he puts it in a better way, in
a fun and interactive way."

About half of Dorge's presentation consisted of games encouraging
students to be unafraid of looking silly.

Some pretended to be Ninjas while the crowd provided the sound
effects. One student had a rubber chicken prop. Dorge also led the
audience in a simple hand-clapping and lap-slapping drum solo.

"If you have sore hands and sore legs from that, I thank you, because
I asked you to do something completely stupid and you gave it 100 per
cent," Dorge said. "The energy we just created in this room is the
culmination of people who gave 100 per cent and those who gave
nothing. If everyone gave 100 per cent all the time, the problems of
the world would be eradicated."