'Savages' Director Oliver Stone: Pot Saved My Life

Director Oliver Stone, whose latest film Savages hits theaters today, credits smoking marijuana during two tours of Vietnam with saving his life and his sanity. "[Pot] made the difference between staying human and becoming a beast," Stone told CBS This Morning earlier this week. "A lot of people in my platoon used it, not on the front lines, but in the back to relax and stay in touch with themselves. I looked on it as a lifesaver at the time. We walked out relatively whole. ..The guys who did dope were more conscious of life."

Stone, who appears on the August cover of High Times magazine wearing a tuxedo and smoking a joint, has long been an advocate of weed.

Savages is an R-rated adaptation of Don Winslow's novel about the Mexican drug war. It stars Blake Lively, Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch, as well as Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek and John Travolta. The film has been receiving fairly good ratings from critics. "Stylistically, Stone summons up many of the visual and aural tropes of his creatively assaultive works of 15 or so years ago, to mostly strong effect; there's solarization and blood-soaked saturation, alternation from color to black-and-white and film to computer/video images, altered state-suggestive editing, warping of time and anything else he can think of — all appropriate to the occasion," writes Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter. "The re-creations of cartel charnel house torture are gruesome and pushed to the limit of mainstream acceptability."