Is there anyone out there who still isn't clear about what those tropes mean? Okay, last time.

The Partnership to End Addiction (known throughout the years as the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the Partnership for a Drug-Free World, the Partnership at DrugFree.org, and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids) is an American organization based in New York that aims to keep kids and teens from doing drugs.

Since their founding in 1985, they have produced many a memorable Public Service Announcement as part of the War on Drugs. Their most famous ad of all is the infamous "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" spot, which compared drug use to frying an egg (meant to represent one's brain). Some of their PSAs were also dubbed into Spanish and distributed across Latin America, under the name Asociación Pro-América Libre de Drogas (Pro-Drug-Free America Association).

Most of the PSAs from this organization, which span from its founding in 1985 to 2010, can be found here for your viewing enjoyment, courtesy of HelloImAPizza.

This is your brain on TV Tropes:

• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: A lot of PSAs have this trope as the focus.
• Ambiguous Situation: Whether or not Susie died in "Final Lesson". The line "Susie's parents never taught her that drugs maim; drugs kill. So Susie learned one final lesson on her own" seems to imply such, but the ambulance leaving her house could imply that she is alive but in critical condition.
• And I Must Scream:
  • One rare spot from 1987, "Vegetable", has a young man explaining to the audience how his older brother and a friend named Rick used drugs to celebrate his birthday two years ago. It ended with the friend dying and the brother ending up in a permanent vegetative state.
  • Another ad is a long, static shot of the ceiling of a hospital room with an IV bag in view. An incessant dripping noise is heard throughout the ad. The narrator says, "You think thirty seconds of this is hard to take? Try thirty years," and goes on to explain that sniffing to get high can cause brain damage.
• Arc Words: "Any questions?", for their "Brain on Drugs" spot and its numerous remakes.
• Armor-Piercing Question: In a 2016 follow-up to "This Is Your Brain on Drugs", a group of teens asks various questions on drugs (ex. "Weed's legal, isn't it?"). The final question is "Mom...Dad...did you ever try drugs?"
  They're going to ask. Be ready.
• Babysitter from Hell: A radio PSA featured a babysitter who gets high and walks out of the house, leaving the screaming baby alone.
• Bait-and-Switch: "Jamie". Throughout the ad, we're made to believe that Jamie is the addict in a meth lab. However, at the end, Jamie is actually revealed to be a little girl living in the apartment above the meth lab.
• Basement Dweller: In "Nothing Happens", a thirty-something-year-old man smokes weed with his friend in a dark room. He dismisses the idea that weed is dangerous, and he claims that nothing happened to him in the fifteen years since he started. Then his mother calls to him from another room, sternly asking if he is still looking for a job.
  Marijuana can make nothing happen to you, too.
• Because I Said So: Frequently demonstrated in the "Nick and Norm" campaign, where Nick repeatedly states that drugs fund terrorism, but refuses to provide any evidence and simply reasserts that it's a fact because he says so.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Played literally in a cartoon PSA showing a wolf passing by a field of sheep ... only for one of them to be eaten by another sheep. The message was that you never know who might be offering your child drugs.
  • In another PSA from the same campaign, a boy who is being bullied at school befriends a classmate who defends him from the bullies - only to later start offering him drugs.
• Circular Reasoning: A literal example; "Circles" shows a man locked in a room saying "I do coke so I can work longer so I can earn more so I can do more coke" and so on and so forth while walking around in a circle before suddenly disappearing.
• Constantly Curious: "El Preguntón" features a father who constantly asks questions about what his children are doing, when, where, why, and with whom.
• Cool Uncle: In one of the "Don't Be a Patsy" PSAs, Patsy asks Uncle Ron to speak to her son about drugs. It turns out the reason he knows so much on the subject is because he is a stoner, and enthusiastically asks the son for some drugs.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: The girl in the "Faces" ad has these, especially when they go pale at the end when she dies.
• Darker and Edgier: Their PSAs of the '80s and '90s are this compared to other anti-drug ads of the time. Many of them feature surreal and disturbing imagery, the deaths of the drug users are often alluded to or depicted, and at times explore subjects that other contemporary PSAs usually didn't, such as how drugs can negatively impact your life without you even knowing it.
• Date Rape: Implied to happen in one of the PSAs in the "Rewind" campaign.
• The Dead Rise to Advertise: A variation of such and a Bait-and-Switch: the narrator of one commercial suggests that they should have a celebrity endorsement, which they did via a slideshow of various celebrities who died from substance abuse-related issues, including John Belushi and Jim Morrison.
• Death of a Child: One PSA from the campaign's "The Anti-Drug" series has various funeral home employees talking about how families go about planning their dead children's funerals after said children die from sniffing inhalants.
• Drugs Are Bad: Goes without saying that every PSA from the Partnership to End Addiction has this message.
  • One ad titled "Grave Words" features a father talking to his son about drugs. However, at the end, it's revealed that the father is talking to his son's gravestone because he didn't think he'd need to talk about drugs to a thirteen-year-old. The ad ends with the phrase "If you don't teach your kids to say no to drugs, it's as good as saying yes".
  • Another ad with the same slogan as "Grave Words" titled "Final Lesson" has the main character, a girl named Susie, overdose and be taken away from her home in an ambulance because her parents never taught her about drugs.
  • "Faces" has this more in the audio than the visuals; it tells parents that if they don't talk to their kids about drugs, they may become addicts right under their noses, which is visualized as a girl becoming more and more sickly-looking. The narrator describes it as "a problem that won't go away" as the girl's eyes go pale. One version of the ad ends it there, but the second, much more common variant has an offscreen person cover the girl with a sheet, with the narrator adding "Or even worse; one that does", confirming the girl has died.
  • One series of ads implored parents to talk to their teen(s) about prescription drug abuse by showing babies attempting to open bottles of prescription pills (two of which put the bottles in their mouths).
  • The 1996 ad in which actor Carroll O'Connor talks about his son Hugh's own drug addiction and eventual suicide as mentioned under Truth In Television.
• Empty Swimming Pool Dive: "Diving Board" plays a serious take on the trope. The PSA has a woman standing on a diving board, ready to jump off into a pool. Near the end of the ad, the narrator tells you to "know what you're jumping into" before you try something new as the woman jumps off the diving board, with the pool empty.
• Gullible Lemmings: An anti-marijuana commercial from The Aughts has a drug counselor translating for a stoner who started doing weed, then was convinced to stuff his fist in his mouth, getting it stuck.
  Stoner: *muffled mumbling*
  Counselor: I'm an idiot.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: In "Final Lesson", Susie is never actually shown aside from a few photos of her as a child.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: A man is subjected to this fate in the anti-heroin PSA "Needle" via falling onto a giant needle; this is meant to be a metaphor for how heroin addicts who start off by snorting it will eventually use the drug via injecting it into themselves as said by the narrator.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: One PSA titled "My Boy" has a mom explaining how her son is well-behaved and never gets into trouble, and how he stays away from drugs. All while said son is meeting up with a friend for a drug deal in the driveway right next to where she's doing laundry.
• Ironic Nursery Tune:
  • Their "Faces" ad has a creepy voice singing a variation of "Happy Birthday" as the addict becomes more and more disheveled and sickly.
  • A quartet of ads about prescription drug abuse featured heavy metal remixes of popular children's songs (these being "Brahms's Lullaby", "Mary Had a Little Lamb", "Pop Goes the Weasel", and "Rock-a-Bye Baby") over footage of babies trying to open bottles of pills.
  • Several of◊ their print ads◊ have nursery rhymes with altered lyrics pertaining to drugs. The "Baa Baa Black Sheep", "ABCs", and "Humpty Dumpty" ads are adapted into a television format.
• No Name Given: Several characters in their ads have this:
  • The girl in "Faces" is not named.
  • The man and his son in "Grave Words" are not named.
  • Susie's parents in "Final Lesson" are not named.
  • The addict running the meth lab and Jamie's mother in "Jamie" are not named.
  • Neither brother in the "Vegetable" ad is named, only their friend Rick.
• Off with His Head!: "Heads" mentions that an Arizona man decapitated his child while high on meth and tossed the severed head onto a busy highway.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Some PSAs focus on real or fictional parents who lost their child to drug addiction as a way of trying to convince parent viewers to talk to their kids about the dangers of illicit drugs and avert the trope.
• Parents as People: Comes up in several parent-focused campaigns. Notable examples:
  • "Don't Be a Patsy": Patsy is a well-meaning mom who wants to stop her teenage children doing drugs, but is too embarrassed to ask for help or try to talk to them herself. As a result, she resorts to increasingly desperate methods such as taking the labels off all the prescription drugs in the house (so now she doesn't know which ones she is supposed to be taking) or hiring a drug-sniffing dog to check her kids.
  • "Emotional Drugs": A campaign about how parents can be "addicted" to unhelpful emotional responses when they discover their children doing drugs. In "Denial", a mother is in total denial that her son is on drugs, even when she repeatedly notices her prescription drugs missing and then finds weed in his room. In "Enabling", a teenage girl's mother lets her throw a house party, brings beer for her underage friends, and turns a blind eye to them smoking weed in the house; apparently figuring that they're going to do all these things anyway and it's safer if she's at least there to supervise.
• Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: In the "Nick and Norm" PSAs, Nick (right way) asserts that the drug trade funds terrorism, while Norm (wrong way) doesn't believe this and thinks that, at worst, it's a small percentage of that money.
• Sequel Escalation: In 1998, they remade their famous "Brain on Drugs" ad with Rachael Leigh Cook. Rather than just cracking open the egg, Cook smashes it with a frying pan and then proceeds to demolish the entire kitchen. This was likely done to show that drugs (specifically, heroin) harm much more than just your brain.
  • An early 2000s remake of "Snake" focused on the harm drugs can do to the environment on a large scale.
• Side Effects Include...: Parodied. "Side Effects" presents ecstasy as an antidepressant, in the vein of other commercials for them, but then takes a predictably dark turn:
  Announcer: Ecstasy is not for everyone. In fact, it’s not for anyone. New studies show that ecstasy is toxic to the body. Side effects may include depression, severe anxiety, hypertension, stroke, seizures, heart attacks, liver damage, kidney or cardiovascular system failure, worried parents, loss of friends, isolation, and emptiness.
• Shout-Out: One spot from the nineties starred the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who coach some kids on what to do if someone offers them drugs; that is, to get out of there and get a teacher (or, as Michelangelo suggests, get a pizza).
• Slippery Slope Fallacy: In one of the "Nick and Norm" PSAs, Norm proposes legalization of drugs as a solution to the problem of drug money funding terrorism. Nick claims that this would lead to drugs being legally sold to children - unlikely to say the least, since alcohol and cigarettes are legal but must not be sold to children.
• Snake People: "Snake" has a drug dealer transform into a snake person. Also counts as an example of A Dog Named "Dog".
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • "Everybody's Doing It" has a cheery song about heroin juxtaposed with an addict convulsing and vomiting in a dirty bathroom.
  • The "Meth Cleaner Girl" ad from the same campaign also has a cheery song about meth playing while a woman is shown under the influence of that drug doing various strange and harmful things. An alternate version has the song played in a distorted manner instead, subverting the trope.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: "Surgeon" has a poor sap about to go under the knife of a doctor who is high on marijuana.
• Teenage Pregnancy: One PSA showed a couple in their thirties anxiously discovering that a pregnancy test was positive. It is then revealed that they are "the youngest grandparents in town", and their middle school aged daughter is pregnant, since she had unprotected sex after smoking marijuana.
• Truth in Television: While most of their PSAs show fictional situations, a few are based on real events.
  • One ad from 1990 has actor Jesse Corti tell the audience about a train crash between an Amtrak train and a freight train caused by the engineer of the latter being high on marijuana while on duty, resulting in the deaths of 16 people, including his wife.
  • Another ad from 2006 consists only of a photo of a couple, and the 911 call the boyfriend made while he and his girlfriend (who were both high on meth) were trapped in their car during a blizzard. The text on the screen says that the couple was found, but it was too late; they had frozen to death.
  • There's also the "Rodney on Heroin" ad from the late 90s in which pre-addiction and post-addiction photos of actor Rodney Harvey are shown by a friend of his, who says "This is my friend, Rodney" and "This is my friend Rodney on heroin", then him switching back and forth between saying "Rodney" and "On heroin" as well as the before and after photos, ending with "That was my friend Rodney" and an In Memoriam card.
  • "I Learned it by Watching You": Drug users do often give birth to children with drug-related health problems, especially if drugs are used during pregnancy because said children are born addicted to whatever drug their mother was using and have to be weaned off of it. (Of course, said children could still start using drugs on their own and become addicted again when they are much older if they witness their parents' drug abuse as shown in the ad.)
  • A 1996 ad had actor Carroll O'Connor talk about his son Hugh's drug addiction and eventual suicide.
  • On a much lighter note, the "Surfing Monkey" ad was inspired by an incident where a friend of the ad's producer purchased $400 worth of merchandise from QVC while high. He had no memory of doing so until the packages arrived.
  • In the 1990s, a PSA featured George "Crackhead Bob" Harvey, who had speech problems as a result of crack use.
  • An award-winning 1995 PSA featured a real interview with Lenny, a heroin addict.
  • Another well-remembered PSA, "Celebrity Endorsement," features photos of numerous musicians and actors who have died from heroin or cocaine overdoses, and the memorable tagline: "In advertising, they say one of the surest ways to get your message across is to put celebrities in your commercial. We hope they're right."
  • Another PSA from the late 1990s featured an interview with Troy Dendekker, widow of Sublime’s lead singer Bradley Nowell, who died from a heroin overdose, and their son Jakob Nowell, a toddler at the time.
  • Another PSA from the 1990s features all of the original members of KISS (Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, Peter Criss, and Gene Simmons), each talking about their experience with drugs and dissuading people from taking them.
  • Two ads from the organization in the 2000s focus on Danielle C. Heird, who died after taking ecstasy. One focuses on the pathologist as he describes the autopsy done on her, while another focuses on her father, who is in tears as he states that he would have tried to stop her had he known she was going to take ecstasy and that parents aren't supposed to outlive their children.
  • Another ad from the 2000s focuses on an interview of a teenager named Ashley, who started taking ecstasy when she was 13 years old and continued using it for five years afterwards.
  • "Heads" describes the case of Eric Starr Smith, who while high on meth decapitated his teenage son and threw his head out onto the highway (although the PSA, which depicts a man slicing the head off a doll, implies the victim was a little girl.)
• Wham Shot:
  • In the "Grave Words" ad, a sorrowful father is speaking to his 13-year-old son about drugs. While we believe that the boy is sitting just offscreen listening to him, the pan-out reveals that he's actually talking to the boy's grave.
  • "Vegetable" has a young man in a hospital room discussing how his older brother and his best friend used drugs to celebrate the former's birthday two years prior. He then explains how he sometimes views the friend as the "lucky" one since he died immediately after using, while the reveal shows how the brother had been in a coma ever since.
  • "Swimming Pool" has a young woman about to jump off a diving board as an announcer also talks about drugs while she's in the process of jumping. The end of the ad shows that, just after she jumped, the pool is completely empty.
• You Taught Me That: In an infamous ad from the late 1980s, a man grills his son about where he learned to take drugs, only to learn that the son learned it from him.