This movie is on Netflix Instant, and it's fucking hilarious and sad at the same time. I heard of it years ago, and noticed it on Netflix Instant last night so I watched it with a friend. If you haven't watched it, you should. It's propaganda like that movie that has caused the law to be what it is today in the USA. I can't believe the lies told. Marijuana will cause permanent insanity! Loose morals! Rage! Murder! Uncontrollable fits of laughter! Ok, the last one is a bit true. I think it's funny how smooth their joints were in the movie. Those people were smoking them just like a cig, no coughing, and no one noticed the smell either.
It's funny to watch today, but at the time it did major harm to marijuana's image. The children who would become the WWII generation were told that if you smoke pot you'll go insane, rape, kill and commit suicide. Later when they learned it was all a lie they didn't know what to tell their kids, and the anti-drug campaigns lost their credibility with the baby boomers who took the position that marijuana was harmless. That's the legacy of films like Reefer Madness.
Randolf Hearst was involved in this propaganda. He had huge interest in defiling hemp because it threatened his monopoly on papermills and timber acrage. Just another sickening story from American history you didn't learn in school http://www.reefermadness.org/propaganda/essay.html " ... Since hemp is an annually renewable source, which requires minimal chemical treatment to process, the advent of hemp pulp paper would allegedly have been better for the environment than the sulfuric acid wood-pulping process. Hemp had many champions, who predicted that its abundance and versatility would soon revitalize the American economy. William Randolph Hearst, media mogul, billionaire and real-life model for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, had different ideas. His aggressive efforts to demonize cannabis were so effective, they continue to color popular opinion today. In the early 1930's, Hearst owned a good deal of timber acreage; one might say that he had the monopoly on this market. The threatened advent of mass hemp production proved a considerable threat to his massive paper-mill holdings -- he stood to lose many, many millions of dollars to the lowly hemp plant. Hearst cleverly utilized his immense national network of newspapers and magazines to spread wildly inaccurate and sensational stories of the evils of cannabis or "marihuana," a phrase brought into the common parlance, in part due to frequent mentions in his publications. "
