Netflix’s new cannabis documentary Grass is Greener, out just in time for 420, follows the history of marijuana in America, as the government resorted to increasingly drastic enforcement measures as a weapon for destroying black lives throughout the United States. Directed by artist and former MTV host Fred Brathwaite, more often known as Fab 5 Freddy, Grass is Greener has a myriad of voices speak on the painful legacy of the drug war, even as predominantly white businesses begin profiting off a now quasi-legal marijuana market, built on black suffering.
But it’s not all pain—Grass is Greener is also a jubilant celebration of what cannabis has inspired in black artistic movements since the 1930s, empowering music and art that will forever define American culture. Who better to speak to that than Snoop Dogg? In Grass is Greener, he even shares how he first came to cannabis, telling the story of his very first toke.
Speaking from his recording studio in the new Netflix documentary, Snoop recounts his history with cannabis while smoking his own Bubble Gum marijuana strain. His story begins in 1977, when Calvin Broadus Jr. was six years-old and visiting an uncle.
“I remember one day, he was like, Snoop, come in here. And I came in the living room. He had a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull on the table. He was like, ‘You want to taste that beer?’ I’m like, yeah, so I drunk a little bit,” Snoop recalls in Grass is Greener. “He grabbed a roach clip. He said, ‘Hit this. No, inhale it, nephew.”
“That was my first experience: 1977, smoking some Colombia Red with my uncle on a roach clip,” Snoop says in the documentary, after pantomiming coughing on his first hit. Read more