For thousands of years, Nepali farmers grew some of the world’s trippiest marijuana, in Himalayan valleys so fertile they were considered sacred. In the 1960s western hippies flocked to capital city Kathmandu, and divined wisdom at the thick end of a hash pipe. Nepal was suddenly the world’s cannabis capital.

Then Richard Nixon’s White House launched the War on Drugs, and pressured Nepal’s young king to ban the drug. Cops sent the hippies packing, and torched farmers’ cash crops. The result? Poverty, a black market in hard drugs—and a brutal Communist uprising that ripped through rural valleys like wildfire.

Today, though, Nepal is poised to legalize weed once more. Sean took a trip from Kathmandu into the Himalayan foothills in search of OG Purple Haze with two former heroin addicts—and got way more than he bargained for.

Sound design, scoring and production by the ever-brilliant Dale Eisinger.

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