In Taking Woodstock, Imelda Staunton plays the uptight owner of a Catskill motel. One minute she's kvetching and moaning. The next she's dancing round the lobby like a bonged-out baboon Photograph: Public Domain
Seth Rogen seems to have the perfect stoner's existence in David Gordon Green's dope-fuelled action comedy: an easy job which allows him plenty of spare time to indulge his habit for the demon weed. Then a detour to the high-grade grass carries him slap-bang in the midst of a murder plot. Bummer Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
In Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I, Paul McGann and Richard E Grant return home after an eventful trip to the country to discover their flat has been squatted. Happily they are able to calm their jangled nerves by indulging in an enormous spliff Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Long before he became the go-to guy for 'aving it geezer trash, Danny Dyer starred as cockney raver Moff in 1999's Human Traffic. Notebooks at the ready as he explains to a fellow reveller why Star Wars is really all about Yoda's burgeoning dope habit Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Don't, in other words, do like Johnny Depp does in that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To recap: Depp, aka Raoul Duke, aka Hunter S Thompson, wakes in a wrecked hotel suite with a microphone wrapped around his head, a recorder taped to his chest, wearing Wellington boots and a faux lizard tail. Between them, he and Benicio del Toro have just got through two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multicoloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … plus a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Don't be like Depp Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Spare a thought for Cheech and Chong, who polish off a vast joint filled with 'mostly Maui wowie' and a supersize portion of Labrador dog faeces, only to be arrested and deported to Mexico in 1978's Up in Smoke. What were the odds of that? Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Or to put it another way: don't take Woody Allen to a drugs party. Show him a line of coke and he'll sneeze it halfway across the room, just like he did in Annie Hall. Selfish and antisocial, we call it Photograph: Public Domain
Just look what happens to William Hurt in 1980's Altered States! He first devolves into a feral, primitive man! Later he becomes an amorphous mass of conscious, primordial matter! And we mean, like, literally! Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
In Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 document of the golden age of US porn, Mark Wahlberg and John C Reilly convince themselves that they have what it takes to make it as pop stars after sticking several tonnes of cocaine up their noses. But it all goes wrong, man. It all goes wrong Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
I guess this is, like, what we've been trying to say all along. OK, so take Uma Thurman for an example. She was in this film called Pulp Fiction and she sniffed some heroin and thought it was coke, or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, not good; not good at all. Didn't she have to get some hypodermic needle in the heart or something? Man, that blows. So yeah: know what you're putting in your nose ... or your shoes ... one or the other ... Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
