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So of course Mary comes by, looking for her boys. She runs into Ralph (Dave O’Brien), a regular of Mae’s who has smoked so much weed that he has apparently turned into the Joker. While Mary impatiently waits, Ralph plies her with a joint, which immediately turns her into a giggling, demented lunatic. Ralph gets grabby, because that’s what happens to nice girls who use drugs. Bill tries to intervene but runs into trouble, because that’s what happens when you cheat on your girlfriend.

Are you picking up on the theme here?

The rest of the film (it's only an hour, but it's a long hour) has to do with the ramifications of all this and is full of stern looking judges, sweaty drug kingpins and hysterical 1930s women. There is also the heroic Dr. Alfred Carroll, world’s greatest high school principal, getting to the bottom of things by interrogating his students and sweet talking FBI agents out of classified drug files - because that’s the kind of raw, godlike power high school principals still had back in those days.

It’s hard to objectively comment on the quality of Reefer Madness. It's poorly shot, except for a handful of scenes. There’s definitely more sex and violence (or, what passes for it) than you’re probably used to seeing in a film of this era. Most of the music in the film exists only to suggest that everyone who listens to Jazz is on dope. But there’s a surprisingly effective visual effect near the end, when someone makes a dramatic decision out of guilt and shame. You should be laughing, but instead you just wince. And then you laugh.

But does any of that really matter? You can only watch this ironically, unless you’re the kind of person who never left your hometown, still drives an Oldsmobile and believes everything Fox News tells you to. Then you’ll probably take it pretty seriously. But this really has little to do with how you feel about “marihuana” (Reefer Madness favors the old-timey spelling) and more to do with the fact that whether you’ve ever been to a Phish concert or not, it’s easy to tell when someone’s blowing smoke at you. It might have had good intentions, but Reefer Madness stops just short of implying that one puff of weed will drive you to cannibalism.

Or even worse, premarital sex!

But in the same way hyperbole cheapens drama, it enhances comedy. And though intended as a drama, Reefer Madness succeeds as unintentional comedy thanks to its almost complete reliance on distortion. It’s clear that nobody involved with this movie had ever been within a hundred miles of either a drug or a drug dealer. But I can guarantee you that watching people smoke Reefer’s made up marijuana is a lot funnier than watching real people get stoned. It’s like listening to your Uncle’s bullshit fishing stories. You know it’s all lies, but you play along anyway because it’s the way he buys into it that makes it funny.

So I'll end by saying that Lillian Miles and Kenneth Craig actually aren’t half bad in Reefer Madness. Fish story or not, they’re really buying into it. Which is exactly what makes it funny.

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