Everything’s Better With a Bag of Weed – Family Guy “420″ Episode marks cultural turning point

By now, if you haven’t seen the Family Guy episode “420″, spend three-and-a-half minutes on the “Everything’s Better With a Bag of Weed” song.

Everything IS better with a bag of weed!

Younger folks*, I want you to appreciate the shock and maybe even a tear of joy that came to the eye of everybody age 40 and over watching this.  Here it is, on major prime time national television, a peppy marching band extolling the virtues of “a bag of weed” as smiling normal-looking adults (well, maybe not the perv with the butterfly net) graciously embrace the falling buds from the sky.  On FOX, no less!

A generation ago, it was "Just Say No" to a bag of weed.

Those of us checking that 35-49 box on the surveys were sitting in front of our TVs one night 26 years ago when the First Lady did a cameo to make sure Arnold would “Just Say No” to a bag of weed.

MTV was just debuting a few months later.  As the younger generation came up and hip-hop began dominating the charts, the pot leaf started coming out on the music videos – but not on MTV.  Every Snoop Dogg video I watched had rappers wearing blurry ball caps or blurry necklaces where the offending leaf had been digitally scrubbed.  I can understand blurring out a line of cocaine, or a heroin syringe, or even a bong, joint, or pipe, but the leaf itself?  We have to censor nature?

Now there are cartoon people marching and waving placards of pot leafs, spinning pot leafs, and a cartoon infant and cartoon dog playing marimba on a row of bongs, singing blatantly pro-pot lyrics over a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang tune (Thanks, HuffPo!) on our TVs.

You can catch the whole episode on Hulu.  Do so before reading the rest, because I don’t want to spoil it for you.

I really think this is a turning point in marijuana legalization and that now it’s all over but changing the laws.  The minds are changed.

It’s not just the song but some of the context.  We had a special 420 episode of Family Guy, but also an hour-long 420 episode on G4′s Attack of the Show.  We’ve seen two different documentaries on cable called Marijuana Inc.  Pineapple Express was a box-office hit.  420 isn’t counter-culture anymore; it’s American culture. We have our own cultural holiday, on par with St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo, where even people who aren’t part of our culture are recognizing our celebration.  On FOX.  With middle-of-the-road sponsors like “Cheer” detergent.

It’s also the show itself.  The first mention of pot comes after the friendly cops notice the intoxicated, blood-covered driver with a corpse in the back seat and shovels, but are ready to send him on his way.  Then the pot falls out and they become aggressive drug warriors.  The dog tries to cope with a drug test by getting the infant’s urine.  Simple message: Busting marijuana smokers means ignoring real crime and wasting time forcing grown adults to cheat on pee tests.

The dog refers to the Hearst smear campaign against marijuana in the 1930s.  The prohibitionist father-in-law who has the dad beat up by government-looking goons wants to get it recriminalized because hemp is competing with other his investments in other plant industries. The prohibitionist gets the dog to spread lies about marijuana through corruption and deceit.  The two anti-pot ads – the stick figure dog and the joint-smoking Hitler – are complete nonsense.  Simple message: Your government has been lying to you about marijuana.

The normal people grateful for a bag of weed in the park, because everybody needs something to make them feel good.  A reference to decrease in hard drug use (“you don’t need meth and you don’t need speed, ‘cuz everything’s better with a bag of weed!”).  Legalized marijuana leads to decreased crime and increased productivity and its worst consequences are unkempt giggling TV news anchors and the father’s inability to set up a non-sequitur sight gag.  And obvious in its omission, any reference to the two children of the family using marijuana.  Simple message: Legalizing marijuana will not harm us any more than prohibition has, and will probably help more.

Seth MacFarlane masterfully tears down another brick in the wall of prohibition.  Bravo!

*And get off my lawn!  You kids today, with your crazy tribal tattoos and discs in your ears!  Why, back in my day, we’d tease our hair with Aqua Net and tie bandannas around our legs!  I don’t know why and it didn’t matter!