Grass (1999)

As over 100 countries worldwide celebrates The Global Marijuana March, a comemoration embracing cannabis culture as a personal lifestyle choice and filosophy, being held in the first Saturday of May, with participants uniting to discuss, promote, entertain and educate both consumers and non-consumers alike, we presente Grass, the 1999 documentary.
 Directed by Canadian documentary film director Ron Mann and narrated by actor Woody Harrelson, premiered in Toronto Film Festival, this documentary film exposes the prejudiced and hypocritical history of the United States government's war on marijuana in the 20th century.
 It follows the history of US federal policies and social attitudes towards marijuana, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, broken up into parts, approximately the length of a decade, each of which is introduced by paraphrasing the official attitude towards marijuana at the time ("Marijuana will make you insane" or "Marijuana will make you addicted to heroin"), and closed by providing a figure for the amount of money spent during that period on the "war on marijuana."
 The film places much of the blame for marijuana criminalization on Harry Anslinger (the first American drug czar), who promoted false information to the American public as a means towards abolition. It later shows how the federal approach to criminalization became more firmly entrenched after Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs" and created the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, and even more so a decade later and on, as First Lady Nancy Reagan introduced the "Just Say No" campaign and President George H.W. Bush accelerated the War on Drugs. The film ends during the Bill Clinton administration, which had accelerated spending even further on the War on Drugs.
 Grass is almost completely composed of archival footage, much of which is from public domain U.S. propaganda films and such feature films as Reefer Madness.