Grass: The History of Marijuana

Marijuana prohibition in the United States gets a full retelling, from the plant's early legal status through nearly a century of government crackdowns. Narrated by Woody Harrelson, the film leans on archival footage: 1930s scare reels with titles like Reefer Madness, congressional hearings, police raids, and newsreel clips of officials warning that a joint leads straight to violence and insanity. Harry Anslinger, the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, emerges as the film's central figure, the bureaucrat who built and sustained the drug's criminal reputation across five decades and multiple presidential administrations. The film tracks how each era's politics reshaped the plant's public image, from Prohibition-era racial fearmongering to Nixon's War on Drugs, using the government's own propaganda footage against itself. Music from the eras it covers, jazz, beat culture, sixties counterculture, threads through the archival material. The tone is dryly comic rather than solemn, treating decades of official messaging as a case study in how a plant became a moral panic.