Film

Grass (1999)

Director: Ron Mann

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Mann documents America's 'misguided and ineffective' prohibition of marijuana, and the billions of dollars of taxpayers' money expended thereon, with a plethora of movie extracts, press cuttings, songs and assorted graphics. He relates the ongoing ban to empire building by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, to puritanism generally and to the weed's association with a shifting cast of the threatening and the undesirable (Mexicans pre-WWI, Red China in the '50s, the anti-war movement in the '60s/'70s). The tone is one of amused outrage, appropriate to such laws as the Tax Act of 1937, which stated that marijuana could be grown under licence, and that the issuing of such licences was prohibited; and to such law enforcers as the chain-smoking Culver City police chief c.1960, exhorting everyone to heed the perils of addiction.

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