TV has always loved cannabis. Behind the scenes of industry in the United States we have always smoked cannabis. But by the beginning of the millennium they could meet the plant on screen mostly in negative contexts, comic clichés about stallions or hysterical dramatizations of drug dangers, in a sort of indirect continuation of the US administration’s attempts to influence public opinion through propaganda films like “Reefer Madness” in the 1940s. With the outlawing of cannabis. The television screen became a battlefield for the viewer’s consciousness and the US authorities waged an ongoing war of consciousness as part of the war on drugs.
Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s, the heyday of American broadcast networks at the time, the various anti-drug authorities poured tens of millions of dollars into covert advertising and marketing content on the period’s favorite TV shows, in exchange for broadcasting anti-cannabis messages starring the characters. The main and special chapters devoted to the subject. This strategy failed miserably, but left behind amusing television remnants that are evidence of the futility of the war on drugs.
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Drugs (1968)
In the prehistory of television, “Dragnet” was the undisputed hit series about the honest-but-tough-as-a-cop cop Joe Friday, an uncompromising fighter in crime. The remake of the series in 1967 sent the brave Sergeant Friday into battle against the Devil Weed already in its second season, and it of course ended in tears including a particularly spectacular scene where a stellar mother under the influence allows her little daughter to drown in the bath because why not show such things on TV actually. The speech attached here in a video of one of the suspects has become a prophetic classic that is coming true these days (“Sir cop, a day will come and all the kids will grow up and start wearing suits and voting, and marijuana will be like alcohol, packaged and branded and dissolved and sold straight off the shelf”).
Stanford and Son (1975)
CBS’s response to “Everything Stays in the Family” was a relatively black and edgy sitcom that was considered largely groundbreaking. In its fourth season, a very unusual episode was broadcast relative to the period in which one of the main characters treats the garden of the hippie neighbor and mistakenly thinks that the cannabis plant is a wild variety of parsley. From there, a pair of cops who come to his house get the salad with the parsley, and it tastes good to them and they want more and more, and the laughs are as many as you can surely imagine. It does not matter that it is impossible to get high from eating cannabis in its raw configuration because THC only decomposes at high heat. But why ruin a bad joke with scientific facts.
The Cosby Family (1984)
The ultimate conservative sitcom of the eighties wasted no time, and already in the first season won a handsome pile of taxpayer money to implant in it the episode “Theo’s Joint”, a special episode in which Bill and Claire discover the Extable Joint among their son’s belongings, and go on a campaign Of a hypocritical and pious morality preacher that is enough to degrade even the best child in the world to use crack. The basis of the episode’s plot was later used by many other series and ate the heads off for additional generations of viewers (including “Blossom,” “The Seventh Heaven,” and “Renovating Your Home”).
The Redeemer’s Ring (1991)
The cheesy-doshit high school series of the late eighties and early nineties devoted an entire chapter to its war on drugs in the third season, where the episode “No Hope With Dope” is simply the slogan pushed by the American Drug Enforcement Administration at the time, so shamelessly. At the end of the episode, all the actors line up around the NBC CEO at the time and listen to his speech on marijuana smoking. You have to see it to believe it, so here, look:
Roseanne (1993)
Towards the mid-1990s, a turnaround began to bubble in public opinion regarding cannabis, and the legendary sitcom “Roseanne”, which revolutionized the representation of the lower-middle class on American television and the topics it dealt with, broke new ground here with an incredibly cute episode in which Roseanne finds cannabis stash. Convinced he’s of her eldest daughter but finds out he’s an old stash of her husband Dan, and decides to smoke it along with him and her sister. They congregate in the bathroom and are stoned and cute without anyone drowning in the bath or becoming addicted to heroin. This is probably the first time in history that cannabis use has been shown on television in a close to realistic way.
Friends (1995)
The gang of squirrels that somehow settled on equal apartments in Manhattan was revealed in all its squalor already in the first season, when in the 15th episode of the first season comes to Monica and Rachel’s pavilion a potential investor that Monica wants to interest in her cooking skills, played by the excellent John Lowitz. Phoebe who came with him in the taxi tells them in shock that he “lit a cingala” on the way, and the three aunts-in-law spend the episode trying to ignore the fact that he is stoned all over his head. It’s not terribly funny but it shows the change in the general attitude towards stallions and we want what he smoked.
The show of the seventies (1999)
The nostalgic sitcom for the seventies never hid the stealth of her teenage protagonists, but in the first episode of the second season she did much more than that, as Chard and Kitty – Eric Foreman’s parents – find Hyde’s spice brownies and eat from it along with Donna’s dad and mom. The result is one of the funniest scenes in the series’ history, but more distinctly it spreads the general vibe (which has since taken root on American television) that the effects of cannabis are not so terrible and in fact it’s a pretty sympathetic way to catch a head. Heads in the DEA exploded.
The Simpsons (2002)
The Simpsons have always been a bit stellar in character, but it was only in the 13th season that Homer Simpson arrives at the cannabis patients’ Shangri-La and gets a medical cannabis license after being injured in the eye. He of course overshadows it and smokes non-stop to the point of severe psychedelic hallucinations in the best tradition of animation. Aside from the fact that we have never encountered cannabis that has such a strong and hallucinatory effect, this is still a great scene and an important episode where the most popular family on television stands behind medical cannabis initiatives in various states in the United States, contributing its own to the fight.
Family Man (2008)
The Simpsons have already done it, but it never stopped the “family man” from copying and trying to go further with it. Brian the dog is arrested for possession of a bag of cannabis, and decides to crack down on a campaign to fully legalize cannabis. Baby Stewi helps him and together they sweep the whole town singing and dancing to the polls, bribing and choosing cannabis bags. The mayor is convinced, legalization takes effect, everyone smokes and the town of Kohog becomes a productive paradise. Everyone is happy except for Lois’ father, the wood tycoon, who sees his wood sales collapsing because of the use of cannabis substitutes for paper. He convinces Brian to launch a campaign against cannabis in exchange for the publication of his book. Brian agrees, the book fails, Kohog becomes trash again. Everyone loses. Yeah.
Sort Me (2019)
Ben Sinclair’s network series, which later became Ben Sinclair’s HBO series, is a delicate and exciting stellar comedy about life that focuses on the character of “The Man”, a small drug dealer on a bicycle who also acts as a messenger to his customers and chats with them in a variety of human and heartwarming adventures. Throughout its eight years of existence, from the moment it aired on vimeo until its end as an acclaimed series on the most respected American television platform, “Sort Me” shattered all possible stellar clichés and stigmas and brought a lot of beauty to the world in their place. You are allowed to get excited with her (and if you have not yet miraculously fronted, one of the best binges that illegal streaming can give you is waiting for you).
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