So much pot is con sumed in Billy Corben’s “Square Grouper,” an absorbing and troubling documentary about marijuana smuggling in Florida in the 1970s and ’80s, that you could get a contact high just watching it.
The film, which takes its name from the bales of marijuana tossed overboard by smugglers while being chased by the cops, follows three sets of people:
The aging hippies who founded a religious sect based on the use of ganja (one of many Jamaican names for pot); two middle-class entrepreneurs who were railroaded by the feds into the longest prison terms in US history on marijuana charges; and just about every resident of the South Florida fishing village of Everglades City, which had an economy built on pot smuggling.
Relying heavily on old network newscasts, Corben introduces a collection of colorful characters who just want to get stoned.
He points out the hypocrisy of anti-marijuana laws in a country where cigarettes, which kill millions, are legal while weed, which kills nobody, isn’t.