A few months ago Sands left a message on my Facebook wall with a link to some documentary about weed called How Weed Won The West. Normally Sands is in to pretty cool stuff – you know like exposing Nicolas Cage as a vampire or going to see House of Wax after eating a bunch of magic mushrooms – so I figured it would probably be pretty good. I just didn’t have time to watch a 2 hour documentary about the legalisation of weed in California right there and then. I was probably on tour with Let’s Wrestle or something.
Anyway, yesterday I was back at my parents and to I was looking to do anything to prevent myself from getting hooked on King of Kings 3 again. I had finished Oz and didn’t fancy starting a new TV show before I went to the USA for three weeks and I was at kind of a loose end. But then Sands posted on my wall again telling me to listen to some band – which I didn’t bother to listen to (Sands has pretty good taste in music but he also likes some really weird crap straight edge punk from the 80’s) but probably will at some point – and this reminded me about How Weed Won The West so I decided to check it out.
Unfortunately, part 2 of the link he sent me was down so I had to faff around for a while finding a full version of the stream, but once I did How Weed Won The West was a pretty decent watch. I mean, it was made by stoners so it was obviously very pro-weed, but made a number of good arguments (pretty much crystallised in seminal Sick Chirpse article ‘Growable Gold: How To Save The British Economy‘) and featured a lot of different stories related to the overall argument that were pretty well developed and thought out. It was rather shoddily shot, but I guess it didn’t have a huge budget so I’ll let the guy off.
It’s definitely worth checking out if you have some spare time, not least for the neckerchief wearing Mexican weed growers they manage to interview (they have like a humongous weed farm in Nortern California), the terribly condescending way that all the stoners refer to marijuana as medicine all the way through it (they’re going for the whole marijuana has healing prowess angle in the video) and a guest appearance from Slipknot. Even though Corey Taylor doesn’t smoke weed he’s still for legalisation! Woo!
Anyway if you’re bored check out How Weed Won The West below. Or if you don’t have time now, maybe bookmark it and watch it when you’re bored sometime. Let me know what you think of it. The funny thing about it is that Sands isn’t a stoner anymore, so why was he watching it?
%CODE%
Follow timw_brap on twitter @timw_brap
