Hazy screens: Is Hollywood pushing marijuana? | csmonitor.com
Call it cinema’s stoned age. Films featuring characters using marijuana have mushroomed.

“Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,” the second movie to feature the titular pot-smoking characters, grossed nearly $15 million on its opening weekend, which might portend a big opening for August’s “Pineapple Express,” a Judd Apatow-produced comedy about a pot smoker and his supplier on the run. Also rolling out: “The Wackness,” with Ben Kingsley as a bong-using psychiatrist; “Humboldt County,” in which a medical student spends a summer in a marijuana-farming town; and “Super High Me,” with comedian Doug Benson using the drug for 30 days.

Tom Hedrick, spokesperson for Partnership for a Drug Free America, says he worries that the uptick in such depictions makes the behavior appear too normal, creating bad role models.

But a spike in cannabis use on-screen doesn’t appear to mirror any social trend. If government statistics – which rely on self-reporting – and other surveys are accurate, marijuana use has declined modestly in recent years, especially among teens.

Legalization advocates argue that signs of societal tolerance, including decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana, hint that casual pot use is widespread – something filmmakers are increasingly less afraid to portray.

But antidrug campaigners say it’s time for Hollywood to tighten up.

“Is this the beginning of a major new reflection and glamorization in popular culture?” asks Hedrick. “I think it’s too early to tell, but it worries us because it tends to portend, potentially, a return to attitudes that lead to more kids trying, and more kids using.”

I don’t think movies lately have glamorized cannabis use, I think they have merely reflected cannabis use that already exists in the popular culture.  Nearly all the recent cannabis use in movies is shown either with stigma attached or as a detriment to the user’s life.  Think of Dave Chappelle in “Half Baked” being forced to give up weed to get the girl, for example.

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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