No marijuana, no American: The ubiquity of marijuana in entertainment

“Never think about smoking marijuana in America!” my dad warned me with a disapproving expression before I left for the United States. He told me, “It will make you addicted, then your whole life will be ruined.”  

My father’s concerns reflect a common Chinese sentiment — because marijuana and its related actions are illegal in China, it’s a symbol for losers. The Chinese regard marijuana as the devil — inflicting physical and mental harm — after the First Opium War in 1839 with Britain, which resulted in nearly 100 years of warfare. 

I’ve found smoking marijuana is not as vehemently condemned, however, by many Americans.

More than 88 million Americans used marijuana in the past year, according to the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. During his reelection campaign, President Obama said, “When I was a kid, I inhaled, that was the point.”

Facing the popularity of marijuana in America, I started wondering: Why is marijuana so widely accepted? Despite its arguable drawbacks, marijuana has been indispensable to shaping contemporary American culture after World War II. 

Marijuana is tightly connected to American subcultures, including the Beat Generation in the 1950s and the hippies in the mid-1960s. American mainstream culture has absorbed these subcultures into films and music, with marijuana playing a significant comedic role on-screen. 

While Americans have grown tolerant of marijuana culture in mainstream entertainment, the Chinese still regard marijuana as an evil that strangles addicts’ lives.

In the 1950s, marijuana use became part of the Beat Generation — a group of authors rejecting standard narrative values and materialism while, instead, exploring spiritual religions, sexual liberation and drugs. After World War II, facing the waste homeland and the spiritual trauma caused by the war, writers and poets, such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, started to express the feeling of being beaten by their dramatically changing world. 

In Kerouac’s “On The Road,” marijuana, which he describes as “the tea” in the novel, is the way for characters to liberate themselves from a perplexing reality. Smoking “the tea,” the narrator in the novel, Sal, says, “made [him] think that everything was about to arrive — the moment when you know all, and everything is decided forever.”

John Clellon Holmes’ 1952 article “This Is the Beat Generation” echoes a similar pro-marijuana sentiment. Holmes says that the face of an 18-year-old California girl — who was arrested for smoking marijuana — was “the face of a beat generation.” An article detailing this girl’s marijuana use features her mug shot rather than an image showing her personality.

Holmes notes that the soft eyes in the photo show no corruption, so why was the mug shot emphasized? The use of the mug shot speaks to the Beat sentiment of “why won’t they just leave us alone?” 

As a Chinese student studying in America, I see both sides. 

I think the mug shot represents the face of a generation instead of a single girl. Marijuana has penetrated into the blood of American generations after World War II and means more a spiritual resistance toward the frustration in their lives than merely a physical desensitization. 

Even after the Beat generation, marijuana’s cultural importance has not declined but instead strengthened in the hippie culture. Along with the Vietnam War, the hippie stance — more radically anti-war, anti-mainstream and anti-American policy — became more popular than the Beatnik. Americans have more prevalently used marijuana to express freedom and rejection of the mainstream lifestyle. 

In 1967’s Summer of Love in San Francisco, 100,000 hippies converged in a melting pot of politics, music, drugs and sex. In 1969’s Woodstock Festival, 500,000 people gathered in Bethel, N.Y., for three days’ of peace, love, music and marijuana. However, in order to avoid modern Chinese rocker kids from similarly experiencing marijuana, the “Chinese Wikipedia,” Baidu, hardly mentions the prevalent use of marijuana at the Woodstock Festival. 

With the popularity of Beatnik and hippie styles, those subcultures started to influence mainstream culture in America. Marijuana started to show up in the entertainment industry — such as movies and music — as a symbolic element for Beatnik and hippie culture. Even after these decades ended, their legacy continued.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the pot-loving comedy duo Cheech and Chong produced several marijuana movies and comedy albums such as “Up In Smoke” in 1978 and the album Big Bambu in 1972. Cheech and Chong’s success decades after Woodstock and the Beatniks illustrates how prevalent marijuana is in American culture, something that surprised me as a Chinese student. 

Entering the 21st century, Americans are more rational toward the issue of marijuana. Marijuana has become a cultural theme with comedic features frequently used in contemporary media. “Dazed and Confused,” a 1993 stoner comedy, tells the story of pot-smoking teenagers on their last day of high school in 1976. Similarly, the 2005 television series “Weeds” gained high ratings while telling the story of a single mother selling marijuana in her suburban community. 

These types of shows feature a lighthearted take on marijuana — making cannabis references in American entertainment has become so ubiquitous that whole series and movies dedicated to the plant have become staples in marijuana comedy. This tolerance is ingrained into American culture in a way that it’s absent among the Chinese.

 Marijuana has been deeply involved in American post-war cultures. It has become the witness of the ’50s and ’60s American old generations — the Beatniks and the hippies — and the contemporary cultural theme with comedic value for American young generations. So, marijuana — the “devil” in Chinese eyes — safely takes its root in American culture.

Shengyu Wang primarily writes about culture and social issues for The Pitt News.

Write to Shengyu at shw81@pitt.edu.