Ever since Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper took that acid road trip in Easy Rider, we’ve been hooked. While drugs debuted in the movies long before the 1960s, no other film would so thoroughly reflect and influence a generation’s attitude about getting high. Thirty-odd years later, public attitudes toward pyschedelics, marijuana, and cocaine have varied, but drug films just keep coming, and we probably won’t OD on them anytime soon.

Discuss Hollywood and drugs at the Film forum in Café Utne: cafe.utne.com

In the past year alone, drugs have played a leading role in four critically acclaimed productions. The most prominent was the drug trade saga Traffic, which picked up four Academy Awards. In creating one of the most exquisitely shot films in recent memory, Steven Soderbergh rightfully earned his Oscar for best director. But let’s be honest: Traffic’s anti-drug-war message is hardly groundbreaking. The British TV miniseries on which the film is based, Traffik, attacked the drug war with equal zeal 11 years earlier.

In reality, Hollywood has seldom had anything original to say about drugs, frequently bowing to self-censorship and direct political influence from Washington. In 1936 our nation’s first drug czar, Harry J. Aslinger, was directing a full-scale assault on marijuana, resulting in the now notorious cult classic Reefer Madness. Linking pot smoking with instantaneous insanity, the film depicts innocent teenagers who are turned into bloodthirsty maniacs by the evil weed. (A year later, marijuana would by outlawed by Congress.) That same year also marked the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which one farcical scene shows the Tramp unknowingly snorting and eating a saltshaker full of cocaine. In some ways, Reefer Madness and Modern Times foreshadow the dual tracks of how drugs would be treated in American movies for decades to come: either sending the protagonists into abysmal despair or leaving audiences rolling in the aisles.