[420 Girl]

At the core of The Wackness is a love story between a spoiled psychiatrist’s stepdaughter and a pot dealer in New York City. That the protagonist and his mentor deal and puff marijuana is never made much of an issue and, why should it be? In 2008, popular culture just said yes. From the screen to the art world, literature to the hippies running the Amazing Race, everyone seemed to be getting irie, popular culture providing a bailout the government couldn’t endorse.

Even the Golden Globe Awards got high on amiable stoners. When James Franco earned a best actor nomination for his role in Pineapple Express, it was confirmed: Weed had officially become mainstream and Mary-Louise Parker’s pot dealer had turned the suburbs’ clocks to 4:20. Of course, there’s a downside to all this toking. A B.C. study found that while drinking and driving was down, drug use among motorists had gone up. According to a December study by the Canadian Centre of Substance Abuse, while 8.4% of nighttime drivers tested positive for alcohol, 10.4% proved positive for drugs.

Maybe when the most popular U.S. president-elect in memory admits he “inhaled frequently,” and everyone’s favourite film Slumdog Millionaire is soundtracked by the great M.I.A. song Paper Planes, there’s a lingering effect when the smoke clears. “I fly like paper, get high like planes/ if you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name,” goes the lyric to the M.I.A. song, which was played ubiquitously on both urban and rock radio. Apparently, music’s most popular genres both agreed on broadcasting from the smoking section. What was it about 2008 that made everybody not wait to inhale? Against the collapse of industry, Lil Wayne sipping cough syrup and Twilight’s Kristen Stewart smoking hash suddenly didn’t seem so offensive. This year, the potheads were the good guys. It was the bankers who were getting locked up.

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