Sometimes in the movies the characters use pot. It looks so real when they are using it. What are they really smoking? Pipe tobacco? Spices? I don’t know what else they could be using.
Thanks
Don’t know about that, but I do know that until non-alcoholic beer came along, if you saw people drinking beer in the movies, they were actually drinking beer, because they couldn’t come up with something that had beer’s head retention (in other words, only beer looked like beer).
Well, in the lovely world of the theatre, we use herbal cigs. They tend to have the about to fall apart, kind of chunky look of real pot. 'Course, that’s only for “joints.” I’m not really sure about the stuff they use in pipes, bongs, etc., but it’s probably just an herbal thing.
I do remember the episode of the Dukes of Hazard where the boys were cought with a bale of hay that had been spray painted green and was refered (hah! refer-ed! I kill me) to as mary-jah-wanna. We seem to have come a long way in the field of pot imitating.
Have you ever seen The Beech? I swear that field of MaryJ they found was the real thing. Are there any look-alike plants? Did they use a strain of Mary-J that has no THC? Did they use real pot because IIRC it was filmed out of the country?
In 6Feet Under Brenda uses a bong a lot and the camera catches her smoking from the moment she lights it until she exhales the smoke. The smoke is thick and looks real. It’s amazing.
Where do you buy herbal ciggerettes? Do you have to be 21 to buy them?
I think they talk about it in the audio commentary for American Beauty. I think they said it was just herbal/tobacco type of stuff. Prety harmless. I don’t think that Hollywood cares so much about avoiding use of actual pot as they do for making sure that the actors are able to be coherent for their next take.
I’m sure that many times the stuff they’re filming is real weed. Keep in mind that a lot of these actors are supplied with cocaine on the set, and no one is going to get overly concerned about pot.
CITE???
Chong, on the David Letterman Show, said no (wink wink) that was stunt dope.
It was one of the three main characters in Easy Rider that said they were using the real thing during the filming of that movie.
I’m sure it’s a 50/50 thing. It’s not like they’d get into any trouble using real weed. What proof would the authorities have that it was real? None. All the movie people need to say if they raise a fuss is that it was fake weed.
Hell, Oliver Stone, Woody Harrelson, and Juliette Lewis used real shrooms in Natural Born Killers, and filmed the whole shrooming scene while tripping. They all freely admit to it. And even so, the authorities really cant do anything about it. They pretty much have to physically catch them in the act.
You can buy them in most smoke shops (tobacco stores, cigar shops, etc). I’m not sure about any age restrictions, but I assume you must be 18. In my experience, they smell and taste nasty.
Hemp (grown for fibre and seed/oil) has an appearance almost indistinguishable from the real thing (in fact is pretty much is the real thing, just lacks the THC)
Of course producers wouldn’t come out say, “Yep, it’s real weed.” But I often wonder how many times actors would voluntarily want to smoke real weed to get them in the “zone” for the scene.
A couple months ago, there was a blurb in Maxim that stated the weed in Platoon was real. The movie was shot outside of the US though. I remember reading (or maybe it was on the DVD special features) that baking powder was used in Blow in place of cocaine. Johnny Depp allegedly got horrible headaches from inhaling it.
Recently in the UK people were finding fields (and stealing the plants within and smoking them)of what they belived to be marajuana, grown by the government for scientific investigation into it’s medical value. However what they were actually finding was just fields of commercial hemp which has only miniscule amounts of the chemicals which makes cannabis a narcotic (certainly not enough to give any kind of a high without smoking herculean amounts) which is perfectly legal to grow (though I believe their are a few restrictions in the UK at least because of the tiny trace of these chemicals). The UK government is growing cannabis to investigate it’s medical value, but only in greenhouses at very secure locations.
So my guess is what you saw in the film was just commercial hemp which does look very simliar to it’s close relative, cannabis.
The University of Mississippi has a legal marijuana field for research also. Its outside, but its heavily guarded too.
If you watch the documentary Hearts of Darkness, you’ll see Sam Bottoms (Lance) commenting on his own personal drug use and that of others during the making of the film Apocalypse Now. (Among other things, Martin Sheen’s little dance with a bottle of Jack Daniels was apparently the real thing, as was his blood thereafter.)
If I remember correctly, Bottoms said that despite the fact that he was high as a kite, he actually avoided using some of the drugs he was supposed to be doing on screen because he felt it would dull his edge, or something.
True, at least for the one instance I know. I have a friend that is slowly working on an acting career (he was recently in the TV show Hack) During some of his earlier parts in films, he (along with everyone else) was routinely given cocaine as a stimulant so that they could continue to film for hours upon hours. He became addicted to cocaine from what he was given on set. Thankfully he was able to quit and hasn’t touched the stuff since.
While this is only one instance of a lower-budget film, it does lend credence to the myth that actors are given drugs and doing drugs on set.