The Most Unrealistic Depictions of Cannabis in Pop Culture

Over the years, Hollywood has had a mixed relationship with cannabis. Portrayals have run the gamut from weed as the devil’s lettuce, able to ruin your life and destroy your mind after just a single puff, to a beneficial, life-giving MacGuffin.

Because American audiences have such wide-ranging attitudes towards weed— according to the Pew Research Center, 57% of adults think cannabis should be legalized for both recreational and medical use, 32% think it should be legalized for medical use only, and 11% think it should not be legalized at all— screenwriters can adjust the way they use it as a narrative device. 

“Dazed and Confused” gets it right by treating cannabis as morally neutral and just one part of a full life. But more often than not, they get it very, very wrong. Here, we’ve rounded up some of the most unrealistic depictions of cannabis in pop culture. From Emilio’s bender in “The Breakfast Club” to that iconic episode of “7th Heaven,” keep reading for some of the most outlandish weed-centered storylines to make it to the screen.

“7th Heaven” or the 7th Circle of Hell?

Let’s start with the 7th Heaven episode burned into every millennial’s brain: Season 2’s “Who Knew?” In this episode, a random school acquaintance hands Matt (Barry Watson) a joint. Matt doesn’t smoke it, but he brings it home. Eric (Stephen Collins) finds it, sparking a full-blown investigation into which Camden child is “involved in the drug scene.” Annie (Catherine Hicks) eventually breaks down in tears and admits to Eric that she smoked pot “once or twice” in college.

We have several points of issue with this episode. First, people aren’t running around giving weed to virtual strangers who aren’t actively seeking it out. The very idea that Matt would just be handed a joint in the middle of a school hallway by a person he only knows in passing is pretty preposterous. 

Then, there’s the impact that this single, unconsumed joint has on the entire family. The third-degree Eric gives to every one of his kids, the thinly-veiled divorce threats that come when he finds out his wife indulged years ago, the way Simon (David Gallagher) decides he hates his brother for daring to come in contact with some cannabis, are all completely over-the-top reactions.

Sure, we get parents having concerns about their minor children consuming cannabis. But to act like simply coming in contact with weed is the same as full-blown murder is just excessive and completely unrealistic in our opinion.

“The Breakfast Club’s” Wild Bender

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the smoking scene in “The Breakfast Club.” Instead of a white-knuckle aversion to marijuana, the detention-bound high schoolers are all quite eager to indulge. So much so that they light up right in the middle of the school library, just steps from the principal’s office. And it’s not just a quick puff or two next to an open window, either. They smoke so much that they hotbox a small secondary room off the library. This alone earns a big “yeah, right” from us.

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It’s not just the openness about weed consumption in “The Breakfast Club” that’s totally unrealistic. Jock Andrew Clark’s (Emilio Estevez) high also had us scoffing in disbelief. It’s much more in line with that of a hard drug than cannabis. There’s shadowboxing, some off-kilter gymnastics, and, of course, a glass-shattering scream. Which just leads us to question, what kind of weed were those screenwriters smoking when crafting that scene?

READ: Our Favorite Television Episodes About Cannabis

The Road from Doobie to Dead is a Short One in “90210” 

“Beverly Hills, 90210” struggled to portray cannabis use and its effects accurately. In Season 7, the show introduced Dick Harrison (Dan Gauthier), Clare’s love interest. When we first meet Dick, he’s a rower on the Beta Gamma Beta team, and a pretty upstanding guy. Eventually, he starts smoking weed as a way to blow off some steam, and ten episodes later, he’s dead from a heroin overdose.

These episodes portray weed as a gateway drug and blame it as much as heroin for Dick’s overdose and death. In reality, research finds that far less than half of lifetime cannabis users ever go on to try other illicit drugs. The likelihood, therefore, of someone progressing from substance-free to occasional cannabis use to addicted to heroin in the space of just a couple of weeks is highly unlikely. 

This episode isn’t just unrealistic, it actually spreads quite a bit of harmful misinformation about cannabis use. Far more people find cannabis beneficial, in that it helps them experience pain relief or quiet anxious thoughts, than find it to be a gateway drug like it was for Dick. 

The Madness of “Reefer Madness”

Of course, no list of this type would be complete without “Reefer Madness.” Released in the late 1930s, the feature-length film is about a group of high school students who are pressured to try cannabis by some pushy dealers. After smoking once, they become addicted, and their lives spiral into disaster. They eventually commit a host of crimes while high, including a hit and run, murder, and attempted rape.

Initially intended to teach parents about the dangers of cannabis use, the film went in and out of popularity over the years. And while we can find its campy and outrageous plotline kind of entertaining, there’s so much about this movie that’s just wildly unrealistic. 

The idea that someone could smoke cannabis just once and get so addicted that they’d kill for it, or join a gang to have access to it, has us rolling our eyes. And don’t even get us started on the hallucination plot lines. The characters in the movie hallucinate almost every time they partake, when in reality, research has found that only 0.47% of cannabis users experience cannabis-associated psychotic symptoms.