1970 Marihuana "Weed with Roots in Hell"

A recreation of a promotional poster from Dwain Esper's drug-scare exploitation film Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell, this print was born from the film's afterlife as a novelty of the drug-enthused countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s. Along the top of the print, a man and a woman sit politely with one another at a table—the former injecting the latter with an unlabeled syringe (perhaps with "misery" as seen in the lower left). In the lower right below them the same woman slouches in a bathrobe, presumably dazed or made melancholy from the injection. Between the woman and "misery" syringe, a clawed demonic hand lies among a pile of hand-rolled cigarettes each labelled with a proposed unfortunate side effect of marijuana use. Beneath and to either side of this pile are written warnings (or promises) of the weird orgies" and "wild parties" which might result from marijuana use. Demand for Marihuana When Dwain Esper’s Marihuana opened in May 1936, no major studio could have made it. The Production Code, adopted in 1930 and enforced from 1934, stated flatly that illegal drug traffic must never be presented, and the studios had agreed to distribute only films that passed it. The subject fell to independents working outside the system. Esper and his wife, the writer Hildagarde Stadie, specialized in drug pictures and sold them as warnings: morality plays that toured from town to town, promising audiences what Hollywood would not show while claiming to protect them from it. “Daring drug expose” is the whole business model in three words, with moral alarm serving as the license for spectacle. Counter-Culture Cooptation The second life of these films began once the panic they traded on had faded. In the early 1970s Keith Stroup, founder of the marijuana-law reform group NORML, found a print of the similar Reefer Madness in the Library of Congress. He bought it for $297 and screened it to raise money for reform, and from there it moved to the midnight-movie circuit. The scare films became camp, and their posters went up on dorm-room walls with the irony intact. This sheet, printed in a single color without the film’s credits or its “not recommended for children” line, probably belongs to that second life rather than the first: a warning reissued as a joke for the audience it was meant to warn.