A crumpled yellow automobile wreck sits lodged inside a train car, a smashed motorcycle wedged under its bent fender. Smoke and the smell of burning gasoline fills the air as the sound of police sirens approaches.

Fortunately, this isn't the scene of some horrific railroad accident. It's part of a new interactive multimedia anti-drug campaign aimed at students from junior high through high school.

The Revolution Train, as the project's creators call it, will set out at the start of the school year in September, traveling to Czech towns and offering schools the chance to spice up their drug prevention programs — provided the creators manage to secure the 45 million Kč ($ 2.14 million) needed to pull it off.

"The train is meant to look like an armored vehicle encasing a body that we have to protect," says project creator Pavel Tůma, a graphic designer. "It's also a giant traveling medium. It's meant to appeal to all the different senses."

Innovation or naiveté?

For the most part, psychologists and family therapists working with drug-addicted kids have expressed support for Tůma's project, saying it speaks a language that today's tech-savvy children will understand.

"Our kids today are flooded with all types of information. What the train will do is leave them with a strong impression, a feeling," says Michael Chytrý, a family therapist who advised Tůma's team on some aspects of the project. "It's something they're much more likely to retain than if they listened to a boring lecture."

In keeping with his premise to appeal to all senses, Tůma commissioned a team of chemists to create different scents for each part of the train: So, while visitors will smell burning gasoline as they pass the scene of the yellow automobile wreck, they will catch wafts of vanilla and jasmine in the positive role models car. Along with the sounds and smells, students will take part in interactive stories and use consoles to vote on different story segments.

"It will be a very intense experience. Nothing like this exists anywhere else in the world," says Tůma, who had his project patented.

But, at its core, is this scheme really all that different from the instructional anti-drug videos that North American high schools have been showing to apathetic teenagers for years with questionable effect?

A number of drug experts are skeptical that the train will achieve much. One of them is Viktor Mravčík, director of the National Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

"I think the project is kind of naive," he says. "Sure, it will catch people's attention, but I doubt it will have any long-lasting effect. To me it seems a bit like a carnival attraction."

Tůma dismisses such criticism. "It's absolutely typical. So many people are afraid of new ideas," he scoffs, insisting that his project is more than just a spectacular show that rolls into town and then leaves. Follow-up visits, he says, will be an integral part of the campaign.

'Intense' and 'awesome'

Some 180 children have already tested out the pilot version of the project, which includes two cars.

"We were afraid the older kids would make fun of it," Tůma says. "Surprisingly, this didn't happen. They were really paying attention." He pulls out questionnaires filled out by the students. Comments like "intense" and "awesome" abound.

The Czech Republic's National Anti-Drug Center (NPC), which falls under the Interior Ministry, has been supportive of the project from the start. Spokesman Břetislav Brejcha says the train could be a good way to address a targeted age group in an easy-to-understand language and encourage discussion.

Drug experts agree that it's necessary to talk openly about drugs with Czech teenagers, who, according to a European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction report released last November, rank among Europe's biggest users of so-called soft drugs such as marijuana, along with the British and the Spanish. A recent Mladá fronta Dnes survey revealed that 96 percent of the 143 teenagers polled know where to get drugs. Some 72 percent of them have tried drugs at least once.

But despite the Interior Ministry's support, Tůma wasn't able to get state funding for the project. Private sponsors have so far invested 5 million Kč into the train, but that's only a tenth of the project's estimated final cost.

He's confident, however, that come September, the train will be ready to roll.