Me and My Friends and Our Booze: A Photo Story

Barbara Lokach was a social worker and freelance writer based in Toronto.

Me and My Friends and Our Booze: A Photo Story, by David Paperny and Donna Paulionis, and the accompanying Teacher’s Guide by Karen Landheer constitute a teaching package of drug education aimed at adolescents.

This package, which also includes a thirty-minute videotape from which the Photo Story was adapted, has been put out by the Addiction Research Foundation which, in addition to treatment, specializes in public education/research of substance abuse.

Me and My Friends and Our Booze excellently “covers several aspects of alcohol: factual information, psychological and behavioral effects, reasons for drinking, and the role of advertising” in a very readable format. The use of a videotape/photostory further drives these points home on a personalized level.

However, as drinking may be very much a part of many adolescents’ social groups, the effect such literature will have in curtailing the drinking pattern remains to be studied.