The lazy stoner is dead. In his place stands the marathon runner with the minimalist vape and the CBD recovery gel. Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie, now streaming, is the last bastion of the countercultural original.
The stereotype of the lazy, good-for-nothing stoner, the one who sat glued to the couch staring into space and thinking about everything while wolfing down a bag of soggy chips, is dead and buried, and no one showed up to the funeral. A few Hail Marys, a farewell, and it’s time to lay it to rest. In fact, with Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie now streaming on Paramount+, the road trip documentary from the kings of ’70s slackerism, we come full circle. They were at the vanguard of chaos, the ones who taught us that you could live in a cloud of smoke with the cops breathing down your neck. But today, that “lazy, good-for-nothing” model is a museum piece, a relic as dated as a moldy VHS of Up in Smoke (great movie, btw!).
Cannabis marketing has taken a sharp turn. We’ve gone from an aesthetic of neon weed leaves and textbook reggae to an identity that’s pure design and high performance. Today, the new face of weed isn’t Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, nor is it the Dude Lebowski in his bathrobe with his White Russian. Not at all. It’s your grandma using CBD drops for her rheumatism before meeting up with other old ladies to blow her pension at bingo, it’s the professional microdosing before an important meeting, and it’s the athlete using hemp gel to recover muscle fibers.
The industry understood that the “stoner” is no longer its standard and that, at this point in history, that characterization …
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Author: Hernán Panessi / High Times
