Hollywood gets political with its stoner movies
Pot, stalk and smoking pipe barrels. Devil weed. Mary Jane. Playing twister. Reefer. No matter what you call it, cannabis continues to spark debate in popular culture. More than 70 years into the drug’s prohibition at the hands of U.S. lawmakers, it seems Hollywood is ready to blow smoke in the face of current policy.

The proof can be seen in a new crop of films that don’t just depict glassy-eyed potheads giggling at moronic gags in the tradition of Cheech and Chong, but go much further, suggesting pot as the symbolic cure for personal and cultural oppression.

Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978) was the first film to show rampant pot use without exacting a moral price for all that fun, offering an emotional and cultural antidote to overt anti-drug films such as Reefer Madness.

Around the same time Cheech and Chong started their big screen puffing, the American government banned the word “hemp” from all school text books, insisting any mention of the once powerful hemp industry (predicted to be the No. 1 crop in the U.S. by Popular Mechanics in 1938) would only confuse youngsters who didn’t understand the difference between useful hemp fibre and the combustible of choice among teens.

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