It's Not Just Zammo

It's Not Just Zammo: A Newsround/Drugwatch Special was a special joint edition of the Children's BBC news service Newsround and the BBC's Drugwatch campaign. First broadcast on 1 April 1986, immediately following the final episode of series 9, it looked at the issues arising from the storyline of Zammo McGuire's Heroin Addiction from Series 9. Co-presented by John Craven, the regular present of Newsround, and Nick Ross, one of the regular co-presenters of Drugwatch, the special assembled many of the contemporary cast of Grange Hill in the studio and launched the cast's special music single and video "Just Say No".

The programme included a brief look at the behind the scenes production of the storyline, showing how the writers had researched drug addiction to make Zammo's story as realistic as possible. In the studio Lee MacDonald talked about how he had prepared his performance, including getting his best advice by chatting with addicts. Through examples from both Zammo's story and real life cases the harmful effects of drugs were spelt out, including both the impact on the body and also on those around the addict.

A key theme was why people start taking drugs when they are so harmful, with a focus on how peer pressure is so often the reason for starting. An experiment was conducted with Erkan Mustafa (Roland Browning) playing drums and five volunteers were told to count the number of beats. Four had been told to deliberately miscount and the fifth gave the wrong answer by conforming to the others' answers.

In one scene Nick Ross produced three phials of white powder from his pocket, one being bath cleaner, one being heroin and one being chalk, to demonstrate how drug dealers can easily dilute the substance with other materials and it's not always clear what is actually being sold.

The programme also looked to the United States to see ways in which drugs are tackled including the measures taken by Spingarn High School in Washington DC and the campaign music video "Just Say No". The Grange Hill cast recorded their own cover of the song and did an accompanying video which was shown for the first time on the programme.

A confidential helpline was run during the programme. A fact sheet was created would could be sent away for or else found in that week's issue of Number One magazine. A copy was also sent to every secondary school in the country.