Where's Cannabis?

If films are meant to portray the truth, where is the truth about cannabis on the big screen?  Not weed; cannabis.  Weed is marijuana.  It’s typically smoked as a recreational relaxant.  Cannabis is an ancient medicine, and a conduit for creative and spiritual explorations.  While marijuana the chill-out drug is finding its way to the big screen with increasing frequency, authentic medicinal use of cannabis doesn’t yet rate a cameo.

Booze, butts and bad behavior

Feature films and the characters that come to life within them have traditionally reflected and even informed our popular culture and social practices.  This is particularly evident with our use of drugs.  How many smokers light up and squint like Bogey and Madsen, or sip a stiff one like Pacino and the Bonds?  And who hasn’t seen folks, from gay men to socialites, holding their cigs high-wristed, palm to the ceiling, with the other hand cupping the elbow.  The Bette Davis pose.

From the indies to the major studios, drunkenness and hangovers remain standard vehicles for character tells and scene development.  Every December, millions of viewers still snicker as Uncle Billy, clearly a serious alcoholic, staggers home while proclaiming to be okay.  The same audience response is expected in Thor (2011) when Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård ) passes out from alcohol over-consumption while trying to keep up with the big guy. 

Now that we know the truth and have the stats, tobacco and alcohol use on the big screen ought to be going down.  But it’s not at all.  That’s surprising because filmmaking is renowned for giving us a view of our culture that is just one step ahead of the norm.  Even as Colorado and Washington state embody what lies ahead as prohibition fades, visionary films like Avatar (2009) still show us a future with drug choices and practices that even now are so last-century.

Welcome to Cannabis Country

Cannabis country is all around us, and the beauty of that (particularly for dramatic storytellers) is that for the most part that world remains very well hidden and largely unknown to mainstream Americans.  Private grows are taking off, and many of those home cultivators are making their own medicine—an act that is strictly forbidden by our government and yet impossible to stop, tax or control.  And within that shadowy realm, regular folks in ordinary neighborhoods are utilizing cannabis the exit drug as a substitute for toxic and addictive substances that wreck the lives of people from all walks of life—and still define the choices of big-screen characters.

While cannabis use in upscale neighborhoods is on the rise fast, the best place for storytellers to find truly dynamic, provocative, knowledgeable, and colorful characters is to visit with the sort of people found in films like Where the Heart Is (2000) and Winter’s Bones (2010). Think white, broke down, broken, addicted, violent, uneducated, and truly sad.

Unless of course they live in cannabis country, where that same demographic embodies passion, clarity, exploration, empowerment and enterprise.  In rural Maine, you can connect with such people at the summertime festivals in Starks, where many of them remember the old days when drunkenness and beating on things was just the way people got through the long winters.  Not anymore.  Local police in that state and in others have long understood the convenient connection between cannabis use and a reduction in alcohol-related crime, violence and stupid behavior.

In the process of learning how to treat themselves (often completely off the grid of Westernized medicine), rural medicinal pioneers have discovered that cannabis is a safe and versatile medicine they can grow in the basement and refine in the kitchen.  And since all that (scene-making) personal exploration can’t kill them, the valuable knowledge they are acquiring and sharing with trusted friends and family will eventually attract economic opportunity to regions of this country long assumed to be beyond hope.  Not over night, and probably not for decades, but absolutely.  And if it’s in our future, it ought to be in pictures.

Character, Color and Conflict

 

There are two major reasons why filmmakers ought to enrich their stories with medicinal cannabis themes.  For one, cannabis people and practices represent an untapped goldmine of color, conflict and progressive social realities.  The other reason is that since prohibition is a deeply installed war of words and images, bringing the truth to the big screen would be a massive advocacy win for a movement still defined by its love of binge-bonging festivals. 

Movies take us to places we’d like to be, and to worlds we could never go.  If believable big screen characters in excellent feature films were to use cannabis as medicine in the privacy of their own lives, mainstream understanding would rise in a Gore minute.

Cannabis prohibition is on the way out, and since the proof of that future shock can been found in private homes and lives across America, the truth ought to be evident on the big screen.  It’s not.  So while full and unfettered use of cannabis is sweeping the nation, particularly in states where home cultivation is permitted (or at least not busted), screen characters are still rolling fatties, filling bowls and smiling through the smoke. 

Cannabis is medicine; so use it.  Lights, camera, cannabis!

Root essay:  Lights, Camera, Cannabis!  http://cannabisrising.blogspot.com/2012/07/lights-camera-cannabis.html

Related essay:  Cannabis Country sketches for storytellers  http://cannabisrising.blogspot.com/2012/11/medicinal-cannabis-use-pot-plots-series.html

Carl Hedberg is a guitar teacher and cannabis freedom writer living in Lafayette, Colorado.

Disaster movie scene featuring cannabis

As Sandy pounded my home office in Southern New Hampshire this week, I was imagining how cannabis might play in a disaster movie.  

Disasters happen, and shit like what Sandy did to the East coast is happening all over the world and with increasing frequency.  In fact, for a time last week The Hurricane Story competed for media attention with news of a huge quake in Canada, and the tsunami scare in Hawaii that followed.  No doubt about it; we are in the midst of a perfect storm that we ourselves have helped to create: 

High-pressure environmental abuse of the industrial revolution meets geologic cycle from hell.  Killer storms, tornadoes, massive quakes and tsunamis, heat waves, droughts, plagues, extinctions…and cooperation.

Imagine the scene.

It's late at night. The city is in ruins. Out of the debris a community of survivors emerges with that spirit of cooperation we call upon when the pain is shared: it comes on fast in the wake of crushed and broken fellow citizens--all in deep shock from seeing how quickly, how easily the earth can wipe away what we spend lifetimes and countless resources building up.  

In this scene communications are down. Relief boats and planes are not on the way. These survivors are on their own, many in desperate need of pain relief, medicinal compresses, stress relief, sleep… What can they do?  Empty the drug stores?  Sure, but how sustainable is that?

One of the leaders jumps up on the hood of a crumpled Dodge, barking orders in the soft somber rain:

Listen up!  Raid the liquor stores and gather all the dry weed you can.  We’ll meet by the blackened Exxon sign…there’s a wholesale bakery nearby with a generator we can use…No; it’s not a party.  We’re gonna make some serious medicine…

The liquor people finally arrive pushing shopping carts brimming with high-proof spirits.  With so much damage on the shelves the order took awhile to fill.  Being a progressive city, the weed gatherers had an easier time of it—finding dry green aplenty in the ruins of local dispensaries.  Some are rolling and filling pipes for people who find relief with that, while the rest crumble the majority of their haul onto sheet pans for baking.  

Outside under a tarp the organizers have set up a massive cauldron worthy of a Far Side toon.  The lightly baked green from the oven area is brought outside and added to the vat of simmering alcohol.[1]   

One of the organizers explains the process to an inquisitive new arrival;

Heating the weed a bit first is called decarboxilation—decarb—it releases the active components.  Boiling in alcohol is the extraction step.  After thirty minutes or so we’ll strain it and then start to boil it down—all the way down to a sticky paste by the time we’re done…

After it's strained, people line up to begin taking a share of the non-toxic elixir. The first ones to fill their dropper bottles and canning jars will get the weakest medicine.  Like a maple syrup boil, the mixture darkens and thickens as the liquid is reduced.  And very much like maple syrup, the color changes are sweet.  

After an hour or so the bubbling cauldron is yielding Green Dragon tincture, a Dionysian remedy from an ancient time (solid dose; 10-15 drops).  When the alcohol has been completely evaporated, the resulting emerald green paste/oil/tar (possibly the stickiest stuff on the planet) can be dabbed onto a cracker, toked for fast relief, or reconstituted with honey or syrup for use in drinks and cooking. 

That first day of making cannabis medicine goes well, and people continue to arrive with donations of edibles, spirits and weed for processing.  The day after the first awful night is behind them. In the dim light of the fading sun on the second day away from the event that changed everything forever, thousands of people are suffering less because of a medicine they made together as a community while they waited for word from the outside world...

In the future, disaster relief, when help isn't coming, may take a village and depend on cannabis.  That's just a theory, of course.  But the scene would look pretty good on film.


Related article: Lights, Camera, Cannabis!

http://cannabisrising.blogspot.com/2012/07/lights-camera-cannabis.html

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[1] Alcohol of course is flammable.  The vat is outside on the loading dock to avoid build-up of fumes.  So as not to add to the fires ravaging their city, assume the medicine makers can heat this vessel electrically or with rocks heated in a street bonfire.

Give cannabis the screen time it deserves

Last night I attended the fun and lively screening of the NH 48 Hour Film Project up in Hooksett.  My 15-year-old had worked on one of the crews, and I must say it was a bit strange seeing her name scrolling on screen; production assistant, data wrangler...Of course, I'd been hoping to see cannabis up there as well since it's as much a part of the fabric of the American experience as a frosty brew is.  The re-emergence of regular cannabis use by regular people is a great place to look for storylines, complex characters, startling truths, and delicious points of conflict and contradiction.  Most important; the honest portrayal of cannabis use on screen (on stage and in writing) is the perfect foil to the most successful and far-reaching propaganda campaign the world has ever known.