pineapple express im not your friend gif

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS IM NOT YOUR FRIEND GIF MOVIE
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS IM NOT YOUR FRIEND GIF SERIES

Now, another 12 years later, it’s dated-ness proves precisely how far we’ve progressed.QUICK TAKE: Comedy: A process server goes on the run with his stoned drug dealer when the former witnesses a murder and correctly believes the responsible drug lord will send his goons after them. At 12 years old, having never even smoked weed, it seemed obvious that some change needed to come. Re-watching Pineapple Express, which has just landed on Netflix and Amazon Prime, is still enjoyable despite all this, even if just to mark how far we’ve come.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS IM NOT YOUR FRIEND GIF MOVIE

We don’t really need a big-time movie to drive the point home anymore. As of 2019, two-thirds of Americans agree that marijuana should be legal.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS IM NOT YOUR FRIEND GIF SERIES

The failure of weed-centric series like Disjointed is further evidence of this. A show like Broad City, for example, can feature weed-smoking and stoner characters without itself being a stoner show. Weed no longer needs to be the crux of a show or movie, relegated to a plotline focusing exclusively upon it. Pineapple Express is not itself responsible for this shift, but it did contribute to the changes in cultural attitudes toward weed that allowed this to happen.Īt this point, creating a movie like Pineapple Express today - particularly in the state of California - would nearly be passé. It made the point that weed should be legal or at least decriminalized, and now for a significant portion of the American population, it is. To that end, Pineapple Express marked a sort of final frontier for the theme of weed in film and television. The act of smoking weed gets them in trouble at various points in the film, but not as much as the illegal distribution of cannabis dominated by various criminal enterprises (with the cooperation of police) who rule by brute force and murder does. Ultimately, the fact that protagonists Dale Denton and Saul Silver smoke a ton of weed is simply a vehicle to a broader discourse surrounding legalization. While Pineapple Express plays up the stoner antics and the dumb shit people do while high like the rest, it relies less upon parody and exaggeration. It’s these latter messages that separate Pineapple Express from other movies of the buddy stoner comedy genre like Half Baked, the Harold & Kumar movies or anything pertaining to Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. On an even more basic level, it makes the irrefutable point that criminalization is just stupid. Nevertheless, it gets the basic point across: Criminalizing weed leads to violence and corruption. It lacks the nuance with which we might discuss these issues today, particularly surrounding race and the ways in which marijuana drug enforcement was used as a tool of oppression.

At least with Pineapple Express and what it did for weed, we can look at this optimistically.įrom a macro perspective, the film is a clunky parallel to the absurdity of the War on Drugs and the path toward legalization. Both the opioid epidemic and the mainstreaming of marijuana snowballed from here, onto a path of near cultural hegemony that persists today.

This moment, the one that Pineapple Express represents more broadly, was the tipping point for drug culture. Right before watching the movie, I had to inform one of my friends that the man with whom we’d just shared raw cookie dough three days prior, my older sister’s own best friend, had since died of a heroin overdose. Two of my best friends and I were perched atop a cigarette-scented, beige wrap-around sofa in my older sister’s first apartment, having specifically requested that her boyfriend bootleg us a copy of the film. My first viewing of Pineapple Express was an affair.

Pineapple express im not your friend gif