Although obviously produced on a shoestring budget, director Jane Wells’s Pot Luck is an engaging, well-conceived documentary on the state of marijuana legalization in Colorado. In the first few minutes, it’s easy to get the impression that you’re in for another exploitative Errol Morris-style freakumentary designed to mock its subject matter, as we’re introduced to the so-called International Church of Cannabis whose stereotypically stoner founder gives a leisurely tour of the colorful cathedral-like shrine to everything pot-related.
But as the film gradually eases you into Colorado’s newfangled commercial cannabis culture, you begin to realize this is not a world of shady drug dealers in alleyways and street corners but a sophisticated, extremely profitable industry of modernized head shops and vast marijuana growing operations. We meet a few 'budtenders' who man the registers on the front lines and serve customers their daily doses of genetically modified pot ('As long as you disclose any crimes you’ve committed, they’ll give you a job,' notes one budtender). These industry workers naturally have a rosy view of their state’s newfound marijuana freedoms, but the film makes admirable attempts at keeping an even-keeled objectivity.
The optimism of the budtenders and the growers (and, of course, the users), contrasts mightily with the skepticism and doomsaying of the local law enforcement community. And local congressman is as wishy-washy as you’d expect; he has the difficult job of acting as a mediator between his pot-smoking constituents and Dudley-do-right cops like local police chief John Jackson, interviewed in the film.
In Jackson’s case, anyone who begins a sentence with 'I’m not a prohibitionist, but…' is most certainly a prohibitionist. Jackson’s bitterness over the new drug laws is thinly veiled at best, and ironically, the somber cop’s major beef seems to be with the new capitalist freedoms being exercised in the rampant commercialization of the drug. But the most compelling caveat in the film for the widespread commercialization of the drug comes from an addiction expert at Harvard, whose politically neutral factual analysis cautions that the marijuana sold over the counter these days is at least 10 times more potent than the naturally grown grass of the 1960s. And once users develop a tolerance for the hyper-potent genetically engineered stuff, they’ll drive manufacturers to infuse the pot with increasing potency until it reaches truly dangerous levels. Although it’s anyone’s guess how legalization will pan out in the long run in the vanguard state of Colorado, director Wells has given us a wide and fascinating window into the pros and cons of this controversial policy. Recommended. AU: C, P.