A good friend of mine once said that if you do anything for 30 days straight then you’ve created a habit. The consistency sticks and you’re in the groove. Why 30 days is the magic number I don’t know, but it seems to be a pretty well-accepted timeframe.
For Doug Benson, High Times number 2 pot comedian, said 30 days was the number he settled on for his experiment with medical marijuana. Spurred on by his own joke about the success of “Super Size Me,” Doug wanted to see if smoking pot for 30 days, from morning to night, would be detrimental or beneficial to his health or well-being. Essentially, get down to the essence of what it truly is that pot does for the avid smoker. That, or he just wanted an excuse to smoke lots of weed and videotape it.
Of course, it’s not all blazing blunts from frame one. In order to set a baseline for the experiment, Benson, already a consistent pot smoker, is forced to go 30 days without any involvement with his favorite pastime. Throughout the first 30 days, which make up the first half of the film, we see the clean and sober Benson as he performs his comedy routines, visits various doctors, takes memory, mental aptitude and, my favorite, psychic ability tests all so that he has something to compare to when he takes the same tests 30 days later stoned out of his gourd. On top of that, we learn more and more about the legality of medicinal marijuana on the state level in California, and the dichotomy of having a state government that approves while a federal government does not.
Now, I’m not going to spoil the film by telling you whether pot improves or damages Benson, because that’s part of the fun of seeing the film: finding out if all those stereotypes about everything from memory loss to decreased sperm count are true. I will say that on pot or not, Benson is hilarious. Stoned, the man is much more energetic and prone to more fanciful humor, while sober he’s much quieter and reserved, but still delivers the laughs.
I don’t know if “Super High Me” will change anyone’s mind about marijuana use, good or bad. It’s an entertaining doc, and it does probe some serious questions about the War on Drugs, Constitutional rights and the morals of medicating those who need it, but you’ll have to watch and come to your own conclusions. I know that I walked away from the film with the munchies’esque urge to consume tons of Doritos. Then again, I left “Schindler’s List” with the same urge, so you can’t really go by my reaction. Come to think of it, I should get that Doritos urge checked out…
I do wonder when the 30 day gimmick for change will finally run its course, however. I wonder if we’ll get “Super Knocked Up Me” next, where a guy has sex every day for 30 days without a condom (this can double as “Super VD Me” as well, if the sexual partners change from day to day). You know, just to find out how really dead-on those stereotype statistics are too. “Super Cyanide Capsule Me”? “Super Electroshock Therapy Me”?
