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April 19, 2007
The Significance of Weeds
The story line of Weeds is simple enough: "This new series is a single-camera comedy about a single mother who makes ends meet by selling marijuana in the fictional suburb of Agrestic, California. The series exposes the dirty little secrets that lie behind the pristine lawns and shiny closed doors...Mary Louise Parker stars as the suburban mom who resorts to selling weed to support her family after her husband unexpectedly dies." In other words, sort of a stoner version of Desparate Housewives. I also just found out it became a success, having won some awards and been nominated for others; more importantly, a third season is in production
I remember catching parts of one or two of the episodes that aired shortly after the pilot in the Summer of '05 and being offended by the show's shallow, one dimensional point of view; however, I was too busy with other things to follow up. Because I never watched it and the reform e-mail discussion lists never mention it, I forgot about it until someone, or something, clued me about last week's episode. It turned out to be a vicious, but remotely plausible spoof of the medical marijuana 'scene' that's been flowering in LA recently. The very speed with which art has imitated life in this instance is mute testimony to the disaster that has befallen the medical marijuana movement since the Summer of 2005. It's also quite telling that its leaders don't discuss Weeds; especially since the plot of the last episode wouldn't have been at all plausible until the spate of recent publicity about all the 'pot docs' setting up shop in Southern California and how 'dispensaries' been popping up in their wake like so many mushrooms; only to be raided by the DEA with help from local police.
Weeds is to the current medical pot scene what Reefer Madness was to the Thirties and Cheech & Chong were to the Seventies. If the show isn't being financed by John Walters, it should be, because it's doing more to scare anxious parents and convince conservative city council members in California that medical marijuana really IS a scam. It's thus a better deal for ONDCP than the clueless commercials it's been purchasing from Madison Avenue at taxpayer expense.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at April 19, 2007 05:12 PM