(1958) High School Confidential

A tough kid comes to a new high school and begins muscling his way into the drug scene. As he moves his way up the ladder, a schoolteacher tries to reform him, his aunt tries to seduce him, and the "weedheads" are eager to use his newly found enterprise, but he has his own agenda. After an altercation involving fast cars, hidden drugs, and police, he's accepted by the drug kingpin and is off into the big leagues. A typical morality play of the era, filled with a naive view of drugs, nihilistic beat poetry, and some incredible '50s slang. Source

(1951) Drug Addiction - Part 1
(1951) Drug Addiction - Part 2

Marty Malone smokes pot and cuts his mouth on a Pepsi bottle. Then he starts on heroin and ends up in rehab.

(1951) The Terrible Truth

Sidney Davis (born 1 April 1916 - 16 October 2006, Palm Desert, California) was a United States social guidance film director and producer.

His films cover topics such as driver safety, marijuana use, heroin addiction, and gang warfare, among other things. Live and Learn (1956), a fairly famous Davis film, features Davis' daughter Jill cutting out paper dolls in her room. When her father comes home Jill jumps up, trips on the carpet, and impales herself on the scissors. Other children in the film are equally unlucky -- falling off cliffs, being run over by cars, or losing vision in one eye from flying shards of glass.Source

More Sidney Davis drug dumbification films

(1961) West Side Story - Officer Krupke

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1997. The film holds the distinction of being the musical film with the most Academy Award wins (10 wins), including Best Picture (three other films also won 11 Oscars each, but they are not musicals).

Source

Thanks to DML for this one.

(~1958) Marilyn Monroe Smoking Cannabis

The video was unearthed from an attic some 50 years after it was filmed

A reel-to-reel home movie which allegedly shows Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe smoking marijuana has emerged after 50 years.

The silent film, shot at a private home in New Jersey, was recently purchased by a collector.

Monroe at one point is passed a cigarette, takes a puff, but does not appear to inhale deeply.

The person who shot the film told the Reuters news agency the cigarette contained marijuana.

Collector Keya Morgan recently purchased the film for $275,000 from the film's owner, who wishes to remain anonymous.

The film is believed to date from 1958 or 1959, and shows a happy and relaxed-looking Monroe.


"This is the late 1950s so she is already very famous, but this is a personal side of her we've never seen before" said Mr Morgan.

"People have never seen her in such a relaxed pose."

Stored in attic

Mr Morgan is a collector of historical photographs and manuscripts, and is currently working on a documentary about Monroe.

He learned of the film and tracked down the owner, who had kept it as part of an archive that was moved between various homes. In the last three years it had been stored in an attic.

The anonymous owner told Reuters that the cigarette contained marijuana, saying: "I got it [the pot]. It was mine. It was just passed around.

"It was not a party. It was just a get-together. You know, come over and hang out."

In August this year, the burial vault above the remains of Monroe - who died aged 36 in 1962 - was sold for more than $4.6m (£2.8m).

The space was auctioned by the widow of the man buried - face down - above Monroe, to raise enough cash to pay off the mortgage on her Beverly Hills home.

Source

The Words of Lenny Bruce - Marijuana bit

Lenny tells in his unreliable autobiography, How To Talk Dirty And Influence People, how he was introduced to hashish by a Turkish shipmate when he was a merchant seaman in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, he hung out with the hip, pot-smoking clique that congregated at 'The Castle', the stately home in Topanga Canyon of the 'Hollywood hep-cat in residence' and tongue dancer extraordinaire, Lord Buckley.

In 1962, Lenny Bruce published a home made brochure to sell at his concerts, Stamp Help Out, which contained an hysterical and highly incriminating pictorial and written thesis on The Pot Smokers, illustrated with 'actual photos of tortured marijuana-ites', most of whom were him. He also gave copies to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti to sell at his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, but by January 1963, Bruce was so embroiled in narcotics busts and obscenity trials that he sent Ferlinghetti a telegram ordering the destruction of all the remaining copies! Source

(1956) Harvard Psychedelic Club: 1956 Footage Of Housewife's Acid Trip

Here's some rare footage of an experimental LSD session that I came across doing research for my next book, a group biography of British writer Aldous Huxley, philosopher Gerald Heard, and Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's from a television program, circa 1956, about mental health issues.

The researcher, Dr. Sidney Cohen, was dosing volunteers at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. Aldous Huxley, who first tried mescaline in 1953 and wrote about it in his seminal book, The Doors of Perception, got Gerald Heard interested in the spiritual potential of psychedelic drugs.

Heard then turned on Bill Wilson, guiding him on an LSD trip supervised by Dr. Cohen in the summer of 1956 -- perhaps in the same room we see in this video. Wilson, who started AA in the 1930s, thought LSD could help alcoholics have the "spiritual awakening" that is such an important part of the twelve-step recovery program he popularized.

Heard and Huxley set the stage for better-known psychedelic research of Timothy Leary, Richard "Ram Dass" Alpert, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil, who are profiled in my 2010 book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club.Source 4 article

(2010, Jan 14th) The Harvard Psychedelic Club - Lecture about the book

Don Lattin recalls the creation of the Harvard Psilocybin Project (Harvard Psychedelic Club) in 1960-1961 by a group of four students interested in studying the effects of psychedelic drugs. The students, Timothy Leary, Andrew Weil, Huston Smith, and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) would later introduce Americans to mind expanding drugs, alternative healing and medicine, and world religions. Don Lattin discussed his book at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.