Details from IMDB:
Grass is Greener
Original title: Grass Is Greener
A look at America’s complicated relationship with cannabis.
Initial Thoughts:
Anyone who regularly reads my blog knows I’m a huge cannabis lover and have been consuming it usually 3 times a week since early 2019, and as such, I’m always interested in documentaries on my favourite plant/activity. I was going through my lengthy Netflix playlist and found this one, so, as I was up early Saturday to feed our cats, I gave it a watch. I watched this as a white guy. I know I can’t understand what it is like to be Black, but I think films like this help me gain a little more insight, at least.
Main Points:
This is a pretty serious documentary; most of the time, it does a great job getting into how Black and Mexican people were the ones who brought cannabis, primarily, to the USA. So all of the laws on cannabis were there to punish people of colour, take away their ability to use it, and put them in law with insane sentences. They interview a lawyer, and he describes the laws of some states on cannabis as draconian, and I agree. Also, the fact that many prisons in the USA are a for-profit business, which means that they want as many prisoners as possible, makes it easy for racism to flourish, with more people of colour arrested for cannabis possession than white people, by a huge margin.
This film came out in 2019 and reflects 2018 laws, so it has improved a little bit, but it still has a very long way to go to be fair. People of colour deserve reparation for all the arrests made for cannabis possession and should be given priority/incentives for starting any kind of dispensary. They show a cannabis convention and 99% of the people selling it are white, not only that, but one dipshit even says that you can’t just let dealers become business owners, as they don’t know how to run a cannabis company! Literally, if you were selling cannabis, you would have a very big understanding of how to run this business. I was disgusted watching the propaganda spread about how cannabis is harmful, going right from local officials, to police, to senators and even Presidents.
Final Thoughts:
The movie has some fun parts/interesting observations throughout. Like how the best Jazz singers were the ones who smoked pot, and how when you get high, time slows down, and your performance can be even better (and you enjoy it a lot more). Snoop Dog tells some great stories, and there are moments where you can see he’s pretty high. As I said, there is a lot of serious subject matter here, lots of coarse language, and of course plenty of smoking pot, so ages 19+. I really enjoyed this, it gives a lot of information and shows how the system/government found a way to totally screw over people of colour. If you’re a cannabis user, this is a must-watch, though maybe not when you’re high. I give it a solid 8.5 out of 10. I would have liked to see more celebrities interviewed, and I found the time flew by, certainly not too long at just over 1.5 hours.