Doug Benson’s Super High Me established a medical milestone
We’ve all seen or heard of Super Size Me, the 2004 documentary in which one very brave individual (Morgan Spurlock) demonstrates the physical detriments of eating McDonald’s fast food for 30 days straight. Not to be outdone, Doug Benson created Super High Me three years later with the same intent: to discover first-hand the impact of ingesting cannabis over a long period of time. Benson steps up and makes himself the guinea pig for an experiment that essentially has him smoking marijuana morning, noon and night for 30 consecutive days.
The idea for the film came up during Benson’s stand-up and soon after, he approached filmmaker Michael Blieden with the concept. Benson wanted to make a humorous point about pot-smoking, though he admitted that he approached his experiment with a certain level of trepidation . . . but that didn’t stop him taking his meds over the space of a month. The documentary starts off by having the comic go 30 days without alcohol or cannabis. Then the real fun starts. As the days go by in the film, snippets of information regarding the status of medical marijuana in California are provided to viewers with brief introductions and statistics. Not surprising were the negative effects of the 30-day 420 binge: virtually nothing. Aside from gaining eight pounds and losing some mathematical intelligence (he took the SATs before and after the experiment), Benson’s sperm count increased and his overall SAT score went up. He even scored higher on an ESP test. We guess the experiment was a success. (Andy Cheng)
