Does Modern Society Unfairly Portray the 1950s?

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SadPotato said:
… if the “reefer madness” propaganda is any indication, the attitude a lot of people had toward marijuana in particular was nothing short of backwards…
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Films like Reefer Madness were a huge disservice. You cannot defeat anything dangerous by lying about how dangerous it is or the ways in which it is dangerous. When the people you were trying to scare learn the truth, the credibility of your entire message is destroyed.
 
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Backwards? About a dangerous drug? You need facts not an obscure movie reference.

Upending the social order is called anarchy. That is bad. Social stability is good.
 
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edwest211 said:
Backwards? About a dangerous drug? You need facts not an obscure movie reference.
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Sources please. I’ve used different forms of THC pretty extensively (I have a medical card), and it’s a pretty tame substance as far as how it affects your physiology.
edwest211 said:
Social stability is good.
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Not if it involves oppression of certain members of society.
 
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edwest211 said:
Backwards? About a dangerous drug? You need facts not an obscure movie reference.

Upending the social order is called anarchy. That is bad. Social stability is good.
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Consider the actual effects of marijuana and then look at the movie Reefer Madness, which is not an obscure movie reference at all, since it is one of the most well-known movies of the 20th century. It is in the public domain; you won’t have to pay money or violate any copyrights to see it.

The movie does not warn people that they are going to become unmotivated or that they’ll find mathematics more difficult if they use marijuana or that they could become impressed to a comical degree that “wow” is spelled the same backwards and forwards. The movie depicts high school students who try marijuana becoming violent criminals who eventually fall into hallucination and utter madness, which just does not happen to pot users. Made in 1936, Leonard Maltin referred to it as “the grand-daddy of all ‘Worst’ movies.” It is so bad that it famously became a satire film to demonstrate how hysterical mainstream society was about illegal drugs in general and marijuana in particular, a virtual advertisement in favor of ignoring everybody trying to tell you that illegal drugs are dangerous.

You might say that people who try to tell you that the 1950s were a dystopian nightmare for everybody who wasn’t a white American male are doing the same thing, no? When the message is that over the top, all credibility is lost.
 
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edwest211 said:
Oppression. There’s that buzz word. You don’t overthrow stable societies over perverted sex, illegal drug use and “I don’t want to listen to mom and dad.”
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Maybe to you it’s just a buzzword. For a lot of people, it’s their lived experience.
edwest211 said:
Here is what the FDA or Food and Drug Administratioin, has to say about marijuana: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/fda-and-marijuana
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Did you read it? Basically what they’re saying is that more research is needed, but there’s a significant amount of interest in using it to treat a host of medical conditions. Which I’ve done with little to no physical repercussions.
 
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sallybutler said:
People have this rather strange view that women didn’t work for money until the feminist movement took off. That is a serious misreading of history.
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That is true. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in three women participated in the Labor Force in 1950.
sallybutler said:
Who were the maids, nannies, chefs, governesses, etc employed by rich and moderately well off households? How did widows support their families? Who picked up the slack when a man suffered an injury or illness that prevented him from working?
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Also think of nurses, teachers, secretaries, factory workers, seamstresses, telephone operators, etc. No doubt there weren’t as quite as many opportunities for women in the work force in the 1950s, and it is a shame that they often did not receive equal pay for equal work as men did; but working women were not uncommon at all. Also, it’s just a movie, but I think of Doris Day’s character in the 1959 movie “Pillow Talk”: She is portrayed positively as a well-to-do professional single woman who has a successful career as an interior designer. (Of course, it’s a romantic comedy, so she does fall in love and get married and all that by the end. 🙂 )
 
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You offer no substantive replies. You don’t explain “oppression.”
 
I feel the need to point out that conversions like mine were also enabled by the relative improvement in women’s rights and options outside of the nuclear family.
 
edwest211 said:
If I needed an enemy, I woulds produce a movie like this. The fact is, marijuana is bad. Of the US states who have legalized it, accident rates have gone up. Insurance companies are watching this since they don’t want to pay. People can be irresponsible but must expect the consequences.
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Yes. The attitudes have gone from irrationally wary to irrationally accepting.

Our kids learned that marijuana damages the part of your brain that does math and kills your motivation, that was enough right there. They’re not the drug-user type, but they’re not buying that pot is harmless! You could show them that pot improved some cognitive function or other, and they’d still point out that all the cognitive function in the world is pretty useless if you lose your motivation.


The studies I am seeing are in keeping with what pot users I knew in college told me. They said when they were using they gained weight (because it gave them the munchies) and their grades took a dive. When they stopped using, things got better. When they started using again, things got worse again. Having said that, I had a friend who had cancer and she found it helped her symptoms a lot. She was able to regulate her use enough to also be a reliable scientist by any measure. I’d put it into a ballpark similar to alcohol, with the big difference that alcohol has culinary uses not at all based on its psychoactive effect. The first sip of really good whiskey or a nice wine is enjoyed based on flavor; there is no need to get a “buzz” to make the use of alcohol worthwhile. (I don’t know anyone who uses marijuana because they actually like that stinky smell it has.)

Marijuana may have its uses. I just don’t think recreational use is one of them.
 
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Perhaps a few more comments about the 1950s will appear before this thread closes in about 6 hours.

Reefer Madness came out in 1936.
 
edwest211 said:
Perhaps a few more comments about the 1950s will appear before this thread closes in about 6 hours.

Reefer Madness came out in 1936.
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Does it unfairly depict mainstream attitudes towards marijuana use in the 1950s? I mean what people who didn’t use thought would happen to those who did. The misinformation from the era does not need to come back. It is a good thing to know that pedophiles aren’t just the stranger in the park looking for a lost puppy or giving away free candy, that it is sometimes someone we know who has worked very hard to cultivate our trust. We can feel all idyllic about how “safe” the 1950s felt, but now we know that there were people exploiting that expectation of trust, don’t we? It isn’t responsible to go back to that.

Better we ditch the misinformation of our own era and build how we live on the truth and only the truth.
 
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SadPotato said:
Not talking about the movie specifically, but the whole moral panic against marijuana.
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The problem with marijuana is that it is often used primarily for the intoxication effect, whether or not that effect makes the user into a lax student or an unreliable or unmotivated employee. I realize a lot of people who use responsibly don’t let those effects interfere with their commitments, but we also can recognize that a lot of times that interference is very real and impacts people other than the user.

That is not good when it is alcohol and it is not good when it is pot. I understand it can also have positive effects in terms of coping with pain and decreasing nausea, but that’s not why Oregon has shops with those distinctive green leaves popping up everywhere. The push in our state has been to paint marijuana as this harmless thing, and that just isn’t true.
 
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