Grass Is Greener

The first film directed by hip hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy tells the history of cannabis prohibition in America as a story braided into music. Its central claim is simple and well built: drug bans were never only about the drug, they became instruments of policing aimed at Black and Latino communities. That line runs from jazz musicians to the hip hop generation, assembled through testimony from Snoop Dogg, Chuck D, Doug E. Fresh, Damian Marley and B-Real. The film is strongest when it asks who profits from the legal cannabis market, showing capital moving in while people who served sentences for the same substance are shut out. It is weakest when the conversational format outruns the argument and the historical passages go by too fast. Who it's for: viewers interested in the racial dimension of drug policy and its intersection with music history. Who it's not for: anyone who approaches the subject through numbers and policy analysis and will find a documentary built on celebrity testimony too thin.