"Reefer Madness"
(in quotation marks)
Aka Tell Your Children
Aka The Burning Question
Aka Dope Addict
Aka Doped Youth
Aka Love Madness
This movie is so easy to deconstruct. It practically destroys its own message for you.
First of all, there's their veiled admission that the film is, indeed, fiction. This comes right at the beginning of the film. Although they declare that "The scenes and incidents, while fictionized for the purposes of this story, are based upon actual research into the results of marihuana addictions," they do so only after announcing that "the incidents and characters portrayed in this motion picture are purely fictional and any similarity to actual occurrences and living or deceased persons is coincidental." If the events were truly based on "actual research," why would they insert the standard legal proviso? Obviously, they knew they wouldn't be able to support the claim in court. If the first claim ("this is fiction") were true, the second would be false; and if the second ("this is fact") were true, and they were sued, the first claim would not protect them. Putting the two together invalidates the whole point of the film.
But oh, it gets better.
Despite their intentions, this isn't really a movie about how drugs can ruin your life. It's a movie about how other people can ruin your life, and if you're lucky, drugs will save you. None of the horrible things that happen to Bill and Mary,* with the minor exceptions of Bill's falling grades and single act of sexual indiscretion with Blanche, can really be attributed to the drug.**
Consider:
1: Bill sees Jimmy trying to rape Mary. He's on the loco weed, of course, and so he suffers from the "dangerous hallucination" that Mary is willing. Bill attacks Jimmy. This attack is attributed to the weed. Now, I don't know about you, but if I saw some guy trying to rape my girlfriend, I'd attack him, and fast. I completely don't understand the point of having Bill hallucinate and see Mary cooperate. He was right to attack Jimmy. If it took a pride-bruising hallucination to get the little coward to do it, then the drug really saved Mary, didn't it?
2: Jack woulda snuck up behind Bill whether Bill was stoned or not. Whether or not Jack tried to pistol whip Bill had nothing to do with whether Bill smoked up. Likewise for the accident which killed Mary.
3: Bill didn't get in trouble because he was stoned. Bill got in trouble because he was framed. Jack framed him. Furthermore, Bill is exonerated when Jimmy confesses, and Jimmy confesses because he's high as a kite; so again, you could say that the drug saved Bill.
4: Thanks to Bill's misadventures, the town's whole organized crime ring topples. How could this not be a good thing? Anything that leads to the downfall of organized crime throughout a city is hardly my idea of "Public Enemy Number One."
That's not even counting the ridiculous elements of the plot which simply aren't realistic. Pot makes you drive slower, not faster. Pot doesn't make you irrevocably insane (and it's not entirely clear how a doctor can declare that you're obviously going to be insane for the rest of your life simply because you're insane right now). And in a real world, people have to pay for pot. Nobody gives anyone any money for anything in this movie.
It's a little slow going, but it's a perfect example of a schizophrenic film that says the opposite of what it says it says.
* The sound quality isn't very good, but I'd swear that sometimes they call the girl "Mary Jane."
** Then again, if falling grades and sexual indiscretion are all one can expect from marijuana, it's not all that different from alcohol, is it?