I happened to watch this documentary today on Netflix, so I thought I would give some brief thoughts. This documentary professes to track the legality of marijuana and hemp. However, and to its detriment, this 1.75 hour documentary goes all over the chart, making medical and fiscal arguments for marijuana, and giving several 101 type breakdowns of various pieces of cannabis culture and history, from its pre-prohibition history to its medical and industrial applications to its perception in the culture. It illustrates that the topic’s importance, but it does not offer many new or interesting perspectives. In short, it tries to take too many things on.

From a social standpoint, I was most disappointed in the complete lack of diversity in its depiction of who is impacted by cannabis legality. Of the interview subjects, there is exactly one woman, one person with disabilities, and two people of color. Nor is there any reflection of class issues at stake: the closest it gets to Nearly everyone who speaks is a white man; this reflects who the holders of power are, but it also reflects whom the filmmakers thought worthy of speaking on the issue.

Though the drug war and its ties to the prison industry and sentencing laws are developed in some detail, there is not a single mention of the racism embodied in how marijuana offenses are adjudicated. And in discussion of the medical application of THC, there’s a lot of ableism about people who use pharmaceutical drugs; while the pharmaceutical industry is certainly a worthy subject for deconstruction, people who use pills to alleviate symptoms of disabilities are scoffed at (a common trope of ableism). This compounds the erasure of the film’s choice of interview subjects and makes for a rather tame, uninteresting, non-intersectional critique.

In brief: this movie is an okay source of 101-style material on cannabis, and there are a lot of what professors might refer to as “reliable sources” cited – i.e., advocates with well-documented credentials from the government or well-known universities. And it’s fairly well-constructed – it’s engaging and interesting to watch. But it’s not exactly an in-depth expose; the firmly capitalist and kyriarchal point of view make for a staid and uninvigorating documentary.