"Crude technique, bad acting, and a ridiculous script are generally considered liabilities for a film, but here they're the very reason for its popularity. Some of the dialog is hilarious, like O'Brien (usually a star of B westerns, whose presence here is very curious) demanding that Miles play the piano 'Faster, faster!' as he becomes more and more agitated...Whether the film ever stopped anyone from smoking marijuana is doubtful, but it is certainly a greater success than its producers ever dreamed."
Motion Picture Guide

"Viewed through eyes blurred by no substance stronger than cough syrup, the film is still mildly diverting, with its censorious, bespectacled narrator and its scenes showing wholesome high-school students transformed into monsters by a single puff. It even has a weird, sort of Expressionist power in its mad, jerky party scenes. But its humor, especially for head-movie fans, has always been in its somber, tabloid-style hyperbole."
Ben Brantley, The New York Times (2001)

"It's basically a lousily made film, but the one-dimensional 'vice' and portentous didacticism more than make up for that. One of the most absurdly earnest exercises in paranoia you'll ever have the good fortune to see."
Time Out: London

"A sanctimonious morality play, shot in a no-frills style that might be termed 'Andy Hardy povera,' Reefer Madness balances scenes of hop-crazed jitterbugging and gratuitous cheesecake with the didactic asides of assorted stern authority figures...As the most dissolute hophead in the film, an actor named David O'Brien gives one of the broadest portrayals of mental illness ever committed to celluloid. A twitchy, eye-rolling nut-job who sits around cackling to himself and chain-smoking joints, O'Brien climactically bludgeons his dealer to death without missing a toke."
J. Hoberman, Midnight Movies

"As pure camp, Reefer Madness is only half-successful. Yes, there are scenes that are hilariously over-the-top -- including an oldster run down by a baked teenager -- but little else to sustain us for 67 minutes. Instead, the film is more interesting as a video time capsule reflecting what some saw as a threat to America's moral fiber."
Christopher Varney, Film Threat

"Director Louis Gasnier, who built his minor career around these sorts of instructional flicks, uses a lot of silent film school techniques – extreme close-up (ill-advised when working with a group of mediocrities, as is the case here) to push the film's key emotional buttons (both of them), as well as rapid cross-cut editing to build tension and establish mood through contrast (again, recommended only if you have tension to build and moods to contrast, unlike here). So, while the movie is pretty poorly written, and terribly overacted, at least you can give Gasnier his props for understanding some of the basic grammar of film. That he uses his limited skills to produce such ridiculous material is to his embarrassment something that can only be appreciated through our amusement."
Dan Jardine, The Apollo Film Guide

by Bret Wood