Terence McKenna made an appearance in the 1995 film The Hemp Revolution, directed by Andy Clarke, and, as a result, comments about him appear in several published reviews of the film. Today’s random item is a Washington Post review (March 22, 1996) by Desson Howe and includes the following excerpt:

[I]n the last, briefest section, of the film comes the campy part, during which we see montages of stoned faces and hear about the joys of getting buzzed. “If you don’t smoke cannabis,” says the oddly cadenced “ethobotanist” Terence McKenna, “you may spend your evening balancing your checkbook. If you do smoke cannabis, you may spend your evening contemplating the causes of the Greek renaissance.” Or keeping your face off the floor. Contains brief nudity and footage of stoned people.

You can read the entire review on the Washington Post website here.

The part of the film that includes Terence can be viewed here, where he says:

It does carry a fantasy-inducing, thought-catalyzing quality. It allows the mind to rove and scan in a much more expansive domain of information than is normally the case…

Another clip of Terence is here.

More money has been spent trying to find something wrong with cannabis than any other vegetable material in human history, and what they’ve come up with is so pathetically thin that I am confident that it amounts to a clean bill of health for this stuff.

And another:

Cannabis is not a health problem. The problem is that it promotes social values and attitudes which are unwelcome in capitalist, market-based society; it’s just that simple. A drug like coffee, with a horrendous health profile compared to cannabis, is complete welcomed into the marketplace and the home and the lifestyle of modern people. This is simply that we value certain states of mind and we fear and suspect others and this is based entirely on value systems that are inculcated from above.