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.