POT: NOW STARRING IN YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE

Judd Apatow had a problem. The test screenings for his movie The
40-Year-Old Virgin were killing. But the jokes that were really
landing were the ones featuring pot. Sophomoric, Cheech-and-Chong-y
cheap yuks about weed. But funny ones. He called his old friend Garry
Shandling to ask whether he should leave them in. They went with the
only responsible choice: comedy comes first.

The film opened, and nobody made a big deal about the pot. Nor did
Apatow get called out when the lead character in his next big hit,
Knocked Up, was an inveterate stoner. And on Aug. 8, Pineapple
Express, which he produced, arrives; it's named after a particularly
potent (and fictional) strain of Cannabis sativa.

Time was, pot movies were like Grateful Dead concerts or
parent-teacher conferences: you had to be wasted to enjoy them. And
the genre had two tones, either apoplectic or apologist. But this
summer is bringing us a bumper crop of movies and TV shows--Pineapple
Express, The Wackness, Humboldt County and Showtime's Weeds among
them--with THC in their DNA. Not stoner stories so much as plots that
happen to involve pot, they ask, 37 years after the war on drugs was
declared, whether there's a place in the culture for treatments of
pot that neither criminalize nor celebrate it.

Marijuana is growing onscreen while use of the drug, which has been
widespread for nigh on 40 years, is flattening. About 6% of Americans
smoked it regularly in 2002, and about 6% of them lit up in 2006. And
no, it's not the same 15 million stoners. Many users tend to pick it
up in their teens, then drop it in their 20s. And 50% of them don't
use any other drugs. Selling it is still illegal, but the pot dealer
is no longer the panic-inducing bogeyman he used to be. In movieland,
he's become a stock character, about as threatening as the hot
woman's quirky roommate.

But funnier. "I'm always a proponent for the comedy involved in
people who are under the influence," says Apatow. "I just think it's
fun watching anyone acting like an idiot." Alcohol, the comic
intoxicant of choice for generations of filmmakers, is now too
strongly associated in people's minds with spousal battery and drunk
driving to be truly hilarious.

Gandhi Does Ganja

So ran a recent headline on a story about Sir Ben Kingsley's
appearance in The Wackness, a genial coming-of-age film in which
Kingsley plays a shrink who trades therapy for dope and eventually
joins his young patient Luke in dealing drugs. "For me, the pot was
just a device," says Kingsley. "Through it we tell the lovely story
of a fatherless child and childless father. And because I become his
assistant in dealing with the stuff he's selling, I'm revealed to be
the child."

Although their new movies feature drugs, Sir Ben and Apatow rarely
use the D word when discussing them, as if willing pot out of
delinquency and into mere dysfunction. For The Wackness, weed's a
crutch; it takes the edge off loneliness, ennui or the shyness people
feel around the opposite sex. Luke, the dealer, lives on Manhattan's
Upper East Side and is on his way to college--his safety school, but
still. In Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker's a pot dealer who sells to
successful, bored, suburban business types. Even the protagonists of
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the closest thing we have
to a modern Cheech and Chong, are a banker and a med student. Pot
smokers aren't outsiders anymore; at worst, they're arrested adolescents.

The cultural disconnect between marijuana (the illegal drug) and pot
(that stuff that lots of regular people consume) is the comic fulcrum
of Pineapple Express, in which a process server (Seth Rogen) and his
pot dealer (James Franco) earn the ire of risibly bloodthirsty
marijuana kingpins. Their escape is hampered, of course, by the fact
that they're stoned. It's a high action comedy. Literally.

Audiences appear ready for such a thing--even beyond those 15 million
people, many of prime moviegoing age, who share the protagonists'
appetites. Pot films are making out like criminals. The second of
Harold and Kumar's trips, not nearly as critically acclaimed as the
first, nevertheless did twice as well at the box office. And while
the presence of (legal) tobacco cigarettes in films has become a
cause celebre among public-health advocates, there's not a lot of
protest that putting pot in movies, even ones as silly as Pineapple
Express, glamorizes it.

Except maybe from the film's cast and crew. "Seth and I always argue
whether or not this is an anti-pot movie," says Apatow. "To me, it
clearly is. Most of the film is people trying to murder these two
guys, them trying not to get murdered, and it's all because they're
smoking pot." He pauses. "Seth thinks that's too subtle."