Long gone are the days when talking about weed was something controversial. Although the status of it will always be a never-ending debate, it seems that weed in American pop culture has never been more present and praised. So, here is everything you should know about how it happened.
How It All Started
Initially, marijuana was not perceived as something positive, quite the contrary. It had a very negative reputation. However, it was always present. If we go back to the 60s, for example, and remember the famous Woodstock festival, rampant weed was everywhere. There’s also a quite interesting story on how The Beatles smoked marijuana for the first time, thanks to Bob Dylan. Take a look at this video to get the whole story.
How Did Pop Culture Change People’s Opinion on Weed?
Scientific evidence of the benefits of using marijuana for medical purposes was only one small step forward. What really helped shape people’s opinion was pop culture. Numerous references in pop culture put weed off the taboo list and intrigued more and more people to experiment with it. It was a subtle yet effective way of promoting weed, especially present in hip-hop and R&B music videos, but also in movies.
The advent of CBD and legal solutions like Delta 8 THC helped to make the general opinion more comfortable and used to it. Particularly Delta 8 CBD helped with this as it’s a legal form, here you can read more about it.
Weed in Pop Culture: Best Moments
If you paid attention while watching some of the most famous TV shows or movies, you could not miss numerous references, but in case you did, here’s our list of weeds best appearances on TV:
- Friday (1995),
- The Big Lebowski (1998),
- That 70s Show (1998),
- Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004),
- Weeds (2005).
Famous People Using It
Famous faces are always some sort of role model, whether we are talking about actors, singers, athletes, or politicians. So when some of them publicly admit they are using weed, it is a big deal and has a huge influence. From Rihanna smoking at Coachella to Michael Phelps caught with a bong, the list is long, not to mention hip-hop artists who can’t release a song without smoking weed in their music videos.
420 – Weed Day
Did you know that weed has its official appreciation day? April 20th is considered some sort of a national holiday among those who use marijuana, and although many claim that 420 is actually a police code for smoking marijuana, the story behind it is a bit different and it goes back to 1971. A group of students used 420 as a code for meeting at 4:20 P.M. to smoke, and later in the 90s, one of them worked together with a band to promote code 420, inviting people to smoke on April 20th at 4:20 P.M.
Fast Forward to Today
Today, weed is everywhere, from social media to the streets, many celebrities use it, and they don’t even try to hide it, and since it is so widely available and easy to get hands-on, more and more people use it. Pop culture made it normal, acceptable, desirable, but most importantly, it removed the stigma.