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Grass Rights Support
Posted by FoM on June 07, 2000 at 06:44:04 PT
Filmmaker Ron Mann stands up for pot
Source: Toronto Sun
 Ron Mann says says he's happy the Ontario Film Review Board "has sobered up and come to their senses" by giving the green light to his marijuana documentary, Grass. But the Toronto filmmaker yesterday questioned the motivation behind last week's initial ruling that the film violated the Theatres Act by showing animal abuse -- a few seconds about government testing showed brain-wired chimpanzees being forced to smoke marijuana. The ruling was reversed Monday. The movie opens June 16. 
"In our society we have temperance outbreaks in which small groups of people decide to protect others from doing things for pleasure," said Mann, whose film pounds home the huge cost and insane commitment to marijuana prohibition. "I think that was the real agenda behind the censorship. It couldn't be for what they said it was. I mean, you'd have to ban King Kong if you followed that logic. They abused him." Mann, whose quirky documentaries have included Comic Book Confidential, Twist and Poetry In Motion, said as a filmmaker "there are two basic emotions -- to turn people on to something like I did in Comic Book Confidential, or anger. In this case I really hated what I learned about drug policy. "A friend of mine in New York City got arrested during a cleanup at NYU. An innocent kid thrown in jail for simple possession -- one of 600,000 pot arrests last year. Once you put a face on a number, you say, 'Man, this is really wrong.' It's not about marijuana, but about personal freedom." Narrated by hemp activist Woody Harrelson, whose services were offered for free, Grass follows the criminalization of the weed from its earliest days, as a means of keeping tabs on Mexican immigrants in the U.S. Southwest. The movie barrages the viewer with now-ludicrous government propaganda (remember when pot was supposed to affect your chromosomes?) and frightening statistics, including the fact that the U.S. in the '90s spent more than $200 billion on investigation, conviction and incarceration of marijuana offenders. Ignored is the equally bizarre history of drug prohibition in Canada, which used as a template the work of Emily Murphy, whose book The Black Candle claimed marijuana was part of a plot by black men to enslave white women. "I really just told the American story," Mann said. "It's the legislative history of the U.S., because the U.S. has so much influence on drug policy around the world. I didn't go into what's going on in Amsterdam, or industrial hemp, or medical marijuana. "It was too much of an epic story to begin with, y'know, starting with Harry J. Anslinger, the first U.S. drug czar who wanted to throw pot smokers in jail and throw away the key. "That $200 billion does not include the social cost. Someone fails a drug test and suddenly their whole life, all their civil liberties are taken away. The reason I made this film is because I don't believe marijuana smokers are criminals. They're responsible, hard-working people, adults with families. It's the recreational drug of choice for a lot of people." We mention that the timeline of his film stops at the present, without positing the future. "People want there to be a happy ending, but there isn't one," he said. "On the other hand, when I hear (T.O. Police chief Julian) Fantino talk decriminalization, I think marijuana laws could be like the Berlin Wall. Someday, all of a sudden it'll just fall down and we'll forget why it was there in the first place." A father of four -- ages two to 9 -- Mann knows kids are often used as debate fodder in drug-war talk. "When they grow up, if they choose to smoke marijuana, they should have the right to make that decision," he said. "What I hope is they never get arrested for it." By Jim Slotek, Toronto Sun Published: Wednesday, June 7, 2000 Copyright © 2000, Canoe Limited Partnership. Related Articles & Web Site:Grass The Movie - A Ron Mann Filmhttp://www.grassthemovie.com/Censors Give Grass Green Light on Appealhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5966.shtmlHowls of Protest Greet Ontario Ban of Grass The Moviehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5961.shtmlFilm Banned For Showing Pot-Smoking Chimps http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5952.shtmlGrass : Madness! Communism! Indolence! The Works! http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5897.shtmlHarrelson Makes Voice Heard on History of Hemp http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5887.shtml 
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Comment #1 posted by kaptinemo on June 07, 2000 at 07:40:08 PT:
American laws and Canadian freedoms.
'...the Toronto filmmaker yesterday questioned the motivation behind last week's initial ruling that the film violated the Theatres Act by showing animal abuse -- a few seconds about government testing showed brain-wired chimpanzees being forced to smoke marijuana.'The US governments' efforts world-wide at spreading it's particularly twisted Gospel of Just-Say-No are legendary. (All the while, aiding and abetting La Cosa Nostra through intelligence agencies to smuggle tons of the hard stuff into the country using the latest technology, and doing so for decades; see Alfred J. McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin in SouthEast Asia") But its' attempts at propaganda don't end with (as Mark Twain had once sardonically mused) foreign 'squatters in darkness'. We've had the recent exposes concerning Barry-ola, and the surprise of learning that recently conducted studies in Spain show THC kills brain tumors were actually *duplicated* - AND COVERED UP - by the US government some 26 years ago. Should it come as any surprise that the antis may have leaned on Canada to try to do an end run around free speech by using arcane censorship laws to stifle presenting this info to the public? I am only guessing that this happened, but given everything else that has taken place, from character assasination to *real* assasination, I wouldn't put it past them. 
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