Pubdate: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 Source: South Florida Sun Sentinel Copyright: 2001, Sun-Sentinel Co & South Florida Interactive, Inc Contact: http://southflorida.sun-sentinel.com/services/letters_editor.htm Website: www.sun-sentinel.com Phone: 954-356-4000 Address: 200 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 Author: Todd Anthony, Sun-Sentinel Film Writer ONE MANN'S PROTEST WON'T CHANGE VIEWS The baby-faced 25-year-old was a war hero. In Vietnam he won a bronze star for valor and collected a purple heart. His parents look dazed as they finger his medals. Like so many Vietnam vets who experienced a rough transition back to civilian life, their son had some problems adjusting. In fact, he committed a crime that, in the eyes of the law, ranks among the most heinous and least forgivable. He sold pot to an undercover cop. The quantity? Less than one ounce. The punishment? 50 years. The war on drugs takes no prisoners. Or rather, it takes lots and lots of them -- more than 3 million arrests during the Clinton administration alone according to Grass, a new documentary from filmmaker Ron Mann (Twist). Grass is one Mann's protest song against harsh, irrational anti-pot laws. The filmmaker rolls archival newsreel footage, vintage movie clips and pithy graphics into a sometimes playful, sometimes disheartening deconstruction of the history of marijuana prohibition. The tone ranges from whimsical to sarcastic, but Mann stops short of fury. Pity. The film could have used more passion. After all, he's preaching to the converted; it's not as if the anti-pot camp will take Grass seriously or rethink their views based on anything presented within it -- not with noted hemp activist Woody Harrelson narrating, nor with cheap shots at Richard Nixon (shown rolling gutterballs in the White House bowling alley) and Gerald Ford (stumbling as he deplaned from Air Force One). His bias notwithstanding, Mann pointedly traces anti-pot hysteria to the nation's first drug czar, Harry J. Anslinger, a joyless law and order evangelist and stout prohibitionist whose mission in life appears to have been denying pleasure to as many people as possible. Using footage from silent films of the era to illustrate, Grass takes us back to a time when people actually believed that a few puffs of loco weed could turn a mild-mannered cowboy into a cold-blooded murderer. Anti-marijuana dogma mutated several times over ensuing decades, from the panic stoked by films like Reefer Madness, to Anslinger's testimony before Congress in 1951 that behind every drug peddler there was a Communist trying to overthrow the government. When skeptics pointed out that not everyone who smoked pot killed people, went insane, or started quoting Marx and Lenin, the government shifted gears. The infamous marijuana-as-gateway-drug-to-heroin rationale found favor. But as tens of millions experimented with the herb and few moved on to harder drugs, it became necessary to concoct yet another absurd premise. Voila! Chronic marijuana smokers withdraw from reality and lose motivation. Just ask the Olympic snowboarding gold medalist. Or any of dozens of NBA and NFL stars. Mann contrasts the rabid lunacy of Anslinger and his followers with the progressive views of former New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who commissioned an exhaustive six-year study that disproved every single negative effect claimed by Anslinger. Enraged, the nation's drug czar outlawed all further studies. So began the government's longstanding tradition of not allowing facts to get in the way of marijuana policy. As Grass points out, this custom peaked during the Nixon administration. For all its scope and history the film is by no means comprehensive; it fails to broach the economic motives underlying the continued prohibition of pot. It makes no mention of medical marijuana initiatives recently passed by several states. And it could have been a little clearer about where Mann got some of his statistics. And it inspires commiseration when it should provoke outrage at the harsh injustice meted out to one dazed and confused 25-year-old kid whose life was ruined not by a harmless herb but by the unconscionably rigid laws against it. -- If there's a worse idea going than locking people up for drug use, it's probably locking them up in close proximity to some tyrannical altruist who wants to 'help' them with a problem that probably doesn't exist. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth