alt Hacker NewsSince the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left, and the introduction of the Frankfurt School and 60s post modernism into academia, there has been a widespread belief amongst a large segment of the population that everything traditional is wrong. A social stigma is merely ignorance, that which is seen as bad is actually good, traditions are wrong. All of these things need to be overturned for the enlightenment. Since society deemed marijuana bad, it is therefore good. As those people who were went through that indoctrination in the 60s as students got older, they got into power. They took power in universities. By the 90s they were pushing all of the ideas as the status quo. Students in the 90s then took those ideas, and when they got into power in Media, they pushed those ideas into all movies and tv.
Replies
Alternate theory: there's a shit load of money to be made with legal marijuana so it will be mainstream just to ensure those paychecks keep coming. And for media, it's a low hanging trope that if you want your character to seen edgy but not dangerous, you have them do safe drugs like marijuana. It's easier than the weeks of story it would take to let the audience know they're just slightly anti establishment.
I'm not sure I buy your theory even a little, to be honest. The children of the 60's have, by and large, gotten FAR more conservative as they've gotten older.
Students in the 90s had also lived their entire lives under the counter-productive and utterly racist War on Drugs. That might have colored their attitude more than the leftist indoctrination bogeyman.
This assumes that culture and academia work hand in hand, which is just in line with many right-wing conspiracies and plain wrong.
What an intellectually bankrupt take; Extremely convincing until you realize less than 50% of people in the 60s even finished high school, and less than 8% of them even attempted post secondary education. Rejection of traditional values post 95 is attributable to any number of side effects of humans participating in the internet. We realized the scale of antiquated regulation. Something the “traditional media” would’ve never bothered to cover. This post is about weed not some soap box for your silent generation tears.