Reefer Madness Chapter Summary

Reefer Madness starts off as a PSA, of an authority figure at a high school which is telling them how this new drug marijuana is sweeping the nation and how to stay away from it. He then tells the young teens a story about how terrible and bad the “menace marihuana” is, and that it is a growing epidemic in the young community. It explains that marijuana is a “violent narcotic – an unspeakable scourge”. The story starts at the house of Mae and Jack. Jack walks in and tells Mae that the “marines” just arrived and that the house should start making their merchandise. A lot of people come to the house and start investing in the idea of the drug house that Jack is offering. Jack goes out and tries to recruit young people right outside the schools,

to get them addicted to then increase revenue to sell it to them. He tells Jimmy, Mary, and Bill that there is a really “rad” party at his grandmother’s house that has music and the swimming pool, which is actually a marijuana drug house. Bill and Mary show up at Mary’s house after tennis and reenact Romeo and Juliet, then Bill randomly falls into the pond. Later Jimmy and Bill arrive at the drug house and the group of teens that were already there, peer pressured them to smoke marijuana. They smoked because everyone around him was smoking and they didn’t want to be the only one not doing the cool new thing, which in this case was using marijuana. Blanche coerced Bill to smoke while flirting with him. Some side effects of this new found drug were an increase in laughter, sexual feelings, and hallucinations causing all these teens to act out of control. Jack gets Jimmy to take him somewhere because he brought his car. The while Jimmy was driving in the city after Jack gave him some weed lost control of the car and hit a pedestrian, and then drove away. The video briefly goes back to the original speaker from the beginning of the video and gives the children some accounts and cases that involved under the influence teens and marijuana. One of the examples that he uses is that there was a teen that smoked weed and then later killed all of his family with an ax because of the hallucinogenic properties’ that marijuana has. After he states the cases the video goes back to continue the story about Mae and Jack. It goes back to Mary and it shows that she is worried about Bill and Jimmy and that she hasn’t seen them for a while. Bill was hanging out at the drug house and things escalated with Blanche and they start some heated things. Mary starting to worry more after the police coming by her house about a hit-and-run which she suspects was Jimmy, since he borrowed her car the same time, so she looks for him at the drug house. Ralph opens the door and sits with Mary and convinces her to smoke the weed. Ralph beings to escalate and start to sexually harass her and she starts to scream.

Bill comes out to see Mary about to be raped and he starts to fight him. The start throwing punches and then Jack buts in the fight with a gun to try to apprehend Ralph but then the gun was fired. Mary is shot and killed by accident by Ralph but then since Bill was knocked out by Ralph, Jack made him believe that he had shot Mary, his

girlfriend. Once Bill sees Mary and that in his hand was the gun, he starts crying and going towards Mary’s body convinced that he killed her.

Bill goes to trial for the death of Mary and they sentence him guilty. Mary’s mom cried after the verdict was announced. Ralph hears the news about Bill and he begins to break down and feels guilty, he keeps saying that he needs to see Jack. Ralph finally sees Jack and beats him up, which finally escalates till Mae to call the police. The drug raid was busted and all the people involved in the operation were arrested. Blanche tells the police what really happened, that Bill was framed by Ralph and it was all their faults. Bill got off of trail because there was new evidence that corroborated his innocence. Blanche then jumps out of the window right before she was going to either be prosecuted for accessory to murder or going to be used as a suspect against Ralph. Before she actually jumped she reminisced about how she affected and basically ruined Bill’s life since he cheated on her then got his girlfriend killed. Then Ralph is put through a mental institution because they believed he had to be crazy to act the way he did. Then the original guy at the beginning says his last few words about how marijuana could take over anyone’s

children.
I think that this film was so effective back in 1936 because it was when the public didn’t really know the effects of marijuana and they were scared of what it did to people. The stigma of marijuana has drastically changed from the 1930’s to now. Most of the public was ignorant about the real effects, which wasn’t found until later years. As of now in 2018, marijuana is legal in most states which is changing the stigma that weed was this horrendous epidemic that will cause young youths to, “eventually make them kill their family”. Now we have a lot of scientific research that shows that marijuana is a drug that only makes the user psychologically dependent and how it affects the brain. In society now marijuana is seen as a norm which was only possible because it grew over time. It’s seen as common as cigarettes back then, that it was not directly harmful physically.
The drug that would be targeted now would be the crack cocaine because as of now it is one of the most harmful drugs that are on the illegal black market. This drug can block GABA receptors and increase the heart rate (Gaines and Kremling, 2014), and I believe even around the 1930’s crack cocaine was a problem but since the new drug marijuana came out they looked passed its deviancy to the community. Some evidence that I would use to convey my audience is that the “crack epidemic” showed that the use of cocaine raised from 4.2 million to 5.8 million and that it increased the rates of violent crimes than any other drug (Gaines and Kremling, 2014). Cocaine is also one of the most trafficked drug in the world. (Drug free world, 2006)