By EILEEN SPIEGLER

If marijuana’s early detractors had any idea how long the embers of their outrage would burn to unintended effect, they might have thought better of their propaganda film, practically born ripe for satire.

Reefer Madness, the 1936 morality tale warning against the evils of cannabis, never found an audience until it became a comical cult classic in the early ’70s, and almost 30 years later was reborn as high camp in Reefer Madness: The Musical.

The production at Fort Lauderdale’s Rising Action Theatre takes it a little, uh, higher, gleefully embracing every caricature and building to a hilarious chaos.

Directed by Kevin Coughlin, it channels not only its namesake, but throws in a little Grease and West Side Story, not unaffectionately.

It especially evokes that more recent cult favorite The Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with Brad- and Janet-esque teen innocents Jimmy (Conor Walton) and Mary (Chelsa Greenberg) and even its own “sweet transvestite,” Desiree DuBois, playing placard girl, naughty nurse and other assorted bits, who nearly steals the show without speaking a line.

“Our story begins seven months ago,” according to the stern Lecturer, played by Bill Dobbins, who can arch an eyebrow with the best. Dobbins also morphs into the Five and Dime owner, the devil, a cop and a train ticket seller.

Jimmy is lured away from the tucked-in wholesomeness of hot cocoa and holding hands with Mary by local pusher Jack, played with ’40s gangster oiliness by Larry Buzzeo. (Buzzeo later does a highly irreverent Jesus in a loincloth urging Jimmy to “get high on God.”)

The den of iniquity is presided over by Mae (Nicole Niefeld, Jack’s abused moll, and otherwise occupied by girl-gone-bad Sally (Lindsey Forgey) and wild-eyed stoner — how squeaky clean would you have to be to miss that contradiction? — Ralph (Joel S. Johnson).

Much giggling, eating of brownies and bad behavior ensue, and no matter how hard Jimmy tries to break free from the lure of weed, Jack pulls him back with predictable consequences, the Lecturer intones.

Coughlin and his cast are spot-on with the silliness. At intervals, DuBois slinks across the spare stage with a placard proclaiming bromides like “reefer makes you laugh for no reason” or “reefer gives you potty mouth.”

The mostly cardboard set and the Lecturer’s in-view costume changes are played for laughs, but also strip away the artifice to get at part of the reason Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney wrote the play — their belief that the movie was made to frighten the public into passivity. The clever songs include lyrics like “And once the reefer has been destroyed / we’ll start on Darwin and Sigmund Freud.”

But the dueling messages not-so-subtly embedded here are secondary to the wonderful singing and dancing, despite a few missteps, of the whole cast. It’s all in fun, and worth shedding your inhibitions for an enjoyable night of theater.