Underworld Special - On The Hunt for Himalayan Purple Haze in Nepal
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Purple Haze

You've probably heard of it, might even have smoked some. Trippy stuff. Hendrix loved it, helped spearhead the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. Summer of Love, Grateful Dead, Flowers in Rifle Barrels, you know it. That stuff came from Nepal, more specifically growing wild on the slopes of the Himalayan foothills.

rolled barehand and smuggled into Europe and the US on planes, boats or just plain old stereotype VW campers following paths beaten out by ancient Silk Road traders. This stuff didn't need VCs, no greenhouses, no hydroponics. Just a lush valley in Everest's shadow, burning hot by day, wet and foggy by night.

and a keen-eyed Nepali farmer keeping watch over the whole thing. Thousands of years ago, Tibetans fleeing persecution flooded across stick-thin mountain passes to grow it. They discovered valleys so bucolic and virile they chalked it up to divine luck. These were sacred, hidden places, visible only to believers. You could stand smack bang in the middle of one of these things and you could never even know it existed.

Centuries later, when Western hippies flocked to Nepal, they called the valleys Shangri-La. But that was a phrase some British writer had actually conjured up in the 1930s. The locals knew the sacred valleys as something else altogether, Baal. Now if you imagine taking a three-day trip into a Baal, in the heart of the Himalayan mountains...

Searching for some of the world's rarest strains of marijuana in a beat-up Indian all-roader with two of Nepal's best-known weed activists. You might imagine a soundtrack of wind chimes and sitar strummed by bow-legged yogis, cosmic gong barbs and vibes for downward dogs, dharma and a deep spiritual connection with Mother Nature. In this case, you'd be wrong. This message will self-destruct you.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. I'm in Nepal, more specifically a tumble-down gas station on the edge of its cramped, chaotic capital city Kathmandu. 9,000 what? 9,930. 9,330. That is literally everything I have. It's morning, but it's already roasting hot. My t-shirt's soaked through.

There's a long journey ahead, about three days of it in total. So me and my co-wanderers are stocking up on supplies. Cigarettes, off-brand Red Bull, and most importantly, pan. A highly carcinogenic, Asian chewing snack that's like a potpourri of tobacco, seeds and spices. And it turns your teeth this deep red like you've been drinking human blood all day.

Think our past, Cheers. As you may have guessed, I'm on a journey to see the famed Purple Haze Marijuana of Nepal. But where I'm headed to see it, and who I'm headed there with, well that's a whole other story. Those guys you can hear over early 2000s Jay-Z, the louder one, well that's my driver. His name's Dipesh. He's a recovering heroin addict, used to work at Wichita, Kansas Taco Bell Kitchen.

Tight wound dreads, smile like the Grinch. He swears weed has saved his life and he pays it forward, right? Dipesh is high 24-7, seven days a week. The other guy's name is Madan. He's also a recovering heroin addict. He's squat, gel hair, dresses like a jackass era skater, straight edge, doesn't drink, only smokes a bowl when he's sick, but he sells the stuff, loads of it.

And he was arrested last year for throwing himself in front of the prime minister's car in Kathmandu. He calls himself Nepal's weed influencer. And let's just say he's got the life story to back it up. Friends called him Joseph. So do I. Hey, did you used to get good weed in Wichita? The Mexican weed. The Mexican weed. Thing is, this country is poised to legalize weed.

And that would bookend one of the world's most brutally violent stories of the war on drugs. One which began decades before when Kathmandu was ground zero for the global hippie scene. And that, well that is what this journey is all about. But to understand that and why I'm subjecting myself to 72 hours of music I last heard when I had frosted tips, well we've got to go way back. Way, way back when. Is it good weed?

Awesome man! Weed is too good in Nepal man. But you need to find the place you know. Here like, if you smoke, they be like the animals smoking you know. We are humans. We need good weed. To function. So these guys do the best weed or is it like... No, we do the best weed. They grow the weed. We got the best weed man.

It's all about taking care of the plant, loving the plant, you know, it's being with the plant, you know, for me. And there are, I would say, growers, cultivators and everybody, but me is something different. I love the plant. I am the plant. This is going to be an interesting few days. Oh yeah, man.

Kanak Malidixit, a Nepali author, was born in 1956, six years after Nepal's paranoid, insular king threw its borders open to the world. In the early 70s, yes, Freak Street was the rage because it has these...

Old townhouses of Kathmandu, three stories, were essentially the bottom and the second story were the living outdoor quarters, meaning frontages. The top floor would be the kitchen of the family. So this elongated road just south of the Kathmandu Darbar, the kings of Kathmandu would have lived there before unification.

That is where they all gathered firstly because it was the epicenter of Kathmandu Valley and the epicenter of Nepal. In 1961, when Dixit was a kid, Nepal taxed and licensed marijuana stores anticipating a wave of Western travelers along the so-called Hippie Trail, an overland route from Europe through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Nepal that mirrored trading routes along the ancient Silk Road.

And those royal officials were right. By the time Kanak was a young man, thousands of batik-shirted hippies visited Kathmandu to define eastern wisdom at the thick end of a hash pipe. Places like the Eden Hashish Centre, the cabin, and the Central Hashish Store became lodestars for the counterculture movement. And they were all dotted along Freak Street. But Weed's history in Nepal went way back, way, way further back than that.

Cannabis has its origin as a plant in this region, the Himalayan region generally speaking. And so the evolution of human society in the Himalaya and in South Asia, you can say, has been together with the cannabis plant. As a result, the faiths of South Asia, the culture of South Asia, the cannabis plant is part and parcel of that evolution.

And it includes the fact that the gods were also allowed to smoke hashish, ganja. And so the prime deity who uses ganja is Shiva, one of the holy trinity of Hinduism.

But he was only a later manifestation of earlier gods. When Vedic Hinduism entered South Asia, then they converted existing gods into the Vedic gods. So you would expect that the use of cannabis has had a longer history than even the present day faith and religion. Shiva made no secret of his love for a sesh on the good stuff.

And once a year, Nepalese down tools pick up a clay pipe and head to their local temple for something called the Shiva Rattray. A day-long festival where everybody sings, dances, and yeah, gets really, really baked. Not even the cops care if you're high on Shiva Rattray. Even when smoking of gaja was made illegal,

in the 60s and 70s. There is one day when it's allowed. That's because that is the day and the night of the Shiva. Night of the Shiva meaning Shivaratri. That festival once a year is where it's allowed but it's incongruous that you allow it on a holiest days and then you don't allow it the rest of the days because if you allow smoking gaja out of your religious convictions then such convictions should last throughout the year.

But when Jimi Hendrix sang about Purple Haze in 1967, it gave Nepali weed a new global notoriety in the West. Kathmandu was the beating heart of a recently opened, uncolonized nation in the middle of a green, naturally air-conditioned valley. You could get a taste of the old world for next to nothing. Folks were hooked.

thrill seekers, hippies tired of materialism, Vietnam draft dodgers, socialists, they all came to the city. Many wouldn't turn back for months or even years. The welcomingness of Nepal has to do with the diversity of its population. That you're always open to the other. So this meant that it became a pleasant place. And on top of it all, cannabis was available for free.

down on the road just below from where I live, if there is no tarmac, if there is a bush growing, more likely than not it will be a cannabis plant. And so this just added to the allure of Nepal to the extent that almost all of the overland trippies, as they were called, which also became hippies, almost all of them sold their vans

and essentially decided to hang out in Nepal rather than go back to the Gangetic Plains and move on eastward from here. So Nepal became the prime end point. For many, Kathmandu was the bail, the destination itself.

For others, Nepal became a transshipment point for huge quantities of hash, alongside Kandahar in Afghanistan, and it made its way back into American homes via smuggling operations like the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and their world-famous guru, Timothy Leary. We tell young people today, drop out of school, because school's education today is the worst narcotic drug of all.

Don't politic, don't vote. These are old men's games, impotent and senile old men that want to put you onto their old chess games of war and power. Drop out. Tune in with natural things. Take off your shoes. Get back in tune with God's harmony. Surround yourself with beauty and sacred objects. You can't get caught in the conforming, rote lockstep which we call American society.

By 1971, Americans were protesting US foreign policy on the very temple steps of the Kathmandu Durbar itself. Rumor had it, the daughter of a prominent senator was among the shaggy-haired revolutionaries herself. For hippies, it felt like the movement had hit its heights, right along the very smoke shops of Freak Street that had started the whole thing. Then, it all changed.

Enter President Richard Nixon. Get down from that bog that you've set against you. That here is the bog. Because up there they can get free part of it, at least it's legal. You see, homosexuality, dualism, immorality in general, these are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the communists of that winter are clicking the turn. They're trying to destroy us all.

Nixon had fought his presidential campaign on a fallen nation law and order ticket. And the thought of unwashed Americans corrupting his youth from some Asian backwater? Hell no. It was time for Tricky Dick to break out the big guns. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive against

I've asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of supply as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad wherever they are in the world. A war on drugs, fought across the globe and in the halls of the United Nations in New York City. A tool to bring those teetering between the US and the Soviet Union closer onside.

It sounded good at the time. After all, heroin addiction was soaring in US cities and it was only getting worse among the men and women returning on military planes from Saigon. Dig a little deeper and it wasn't quite so righteous. Nixon's domestic affairs chief John Ehrlichman would never spell it out clearer than in a 1994 Harper's Magazine feature. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, he said.

But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Not a soul in distant Nepal knew anything about America's drug crusade. But it was about to hit them square in the face.

In 1973, the nation's young King Birendra, under pressure from Washington, banned marijuana and broke his own capital's bail. Hippies were turfed out of Freak Street and thrown onto buses headed for India. State troops torched crops and arrested those they caught still selling it. Out in the country's rural hinterlands, especially in the Himalayan foothills west of Kathmandu, the move was a disaster.

For centuries, marijuana was the cash crop. Farmers weaved it into clothing, cooked with its oil, and fed it to cattle to increase their appetite. Yes, Nepal's farmers thrived thanks in part to the fact they gave their cows the raging munchies. But when Nixon's edicts filtered down to their remote bills, everything ended. People struggled to live, and not just anybody.

is Cannock again. If you were well-to-do, you would have a rice paddy at the base of the valley. If you are slightly worse off, you would be able to grow corn and other kinds of mountain barley and other kinds of hill staples. It's the poorest of the poor that would go to the truly marginalized terraces and grow cannabis. So you're poor to begin with.

Nixon's war on drugs was designed to stop communism.

But in Western Nepal, whose poorest farmers were stripped of their livelihood, desperate and starving, the plan would backfire in spectacular fashion when a new rebel force rolled into town.

Led by a mysterious former agriculture graduate named Prachanda, Maoist guerrillas swelled in size, promising to rid Nepal of its avaricious monarchy and deliver its people from some of the worst poverty on earth. Imbued with a Marxist Leninist seal similar to the People's Liberation Army to Nepal's north, and Indian Naxalite rebels to its south, the Maoist insurgents vowed to raise communism's red flag atop the summit of Everest.

The patriarchal makeup of societies in Nepal's rural areas made for light conquering work and swift death for anyone refusing to live in the Maoists' hammer and sickle utopia. The Maoists used the gun in isolated villages where the state security was not there. So with one gun you could control a whole valley because you just have to do an exemplary attack.

torture or killing or whatever and then you have everybody cowed down because the street is not there to protect you. The Maoists bivouacked in the former weed growing villages out west of Kathmandu deep in the Himalayan foothills. The Beors, their headquarters, a tiny little place, a scratch in the district of Rolpa called Tabang.

Hey, how are you? How are you?

Amid the violence, the use of hard drugs in Nepal skyrocketed.

Some profited from these new underworlds. One small tribe up in the snow-capped north of Nepal called the Manangi became so rich by gatekeeping lucrative opium routes across the Himalayas that they transformed their ramshackle villages into luxury towns and bought up entire city blocks in Kathmandu. But for the majority of Nepalese, the war on drugs meant little more than death, destruction and deepening hardship.

Heroin addiction was followed quickly by an epidemic of HIV and AIDS infections. Some eked out livelihoods smuggling illicit weed from their villages across to India. Others barely survived off the land. It was an impossibly precarious life, and many fell through its gaping cracks. This is where Joseph comes in.

Firstly, we used to start from cigarette and gaza and drinks and after that, korex, cough syrup and that brown and then injection. I think we have an emptiness, no? Every people have emptiness. Every people have something emptiness. At the time, I feel like that. That's why I used to feel it by the drugs, that my emptiness.

Joseph didn't need a doctor to tell him he had HIV. It was inevitable. In 2001, Nepal's Prince Tipendra went on a drug and booze-fueled rampage at Kathmandu's palace, massacring nine members of his family, including King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya.

With the monarchy in disarray, the Maoists stepped up the insurgency. They detonated bombs on busy buses and murdered civilians for no apparent reason other than to terrify the Nepali population. Some of them even traded weed across the Indian border for weapons and ammunition.

In October 2002, a gang of them stormed the city in southwestern Nepal near India called Kanchanpur, where Joseph's father worked as a pharmacist and anti-communist politician. Around midnight, some 20 to 25 men showed up at my father's doorstep and knocked on his door. They claimed to be friends of a friend looking for medicine.

When my father figured something was wrong, they changed their tune. They told him, if you don't come out, we'll toss a bomb through your window. Jose's father did as he was told.

The rebels grabbed him and dragged him to a square where four of Kanchenpur's main streets met. By now, worried neighbors have come outside to see what the fuss was about. The initial intention was to break a limb or two, to scare everyone. But the situation escalated. There was a lot of pent-up anger. The rebels slit my father's throat there and then.

Joseph didn't want revenge, and at first he didn't want to get clean either. Instead he fled across the border to Delhi, the Indian capital, and worked at a hospice for HIV and AIDS patients. It was there that he saw how marijuana could ease some people's pain and give them succor in their final days. When he returned to Nepal, he'd make it his life's goal to make the stuff legal.

I learned how to grow and harvest my own cannabis. I understood how this plant was good for the soil, the environment, the country, and even the world. This is where the calls for democracy began. Imagine thousands of people filling this Kulamanch square, demanding the end of the monarchy after years of political repression by the new king.

Many of them were arrested and beaten by the police. In 2008, the war ended and Nepalis went back to the polls for the first time in years. The Maoists entered parliament and then, by most accounts, did very little. Corruption soared and Nepalis wondered if the armed struggle had been all for nothing. Joseph and a fellow activist and former member of Nepal's parliament named Rajiv Kathli got out on the campaign trail.

They lobbied politicians, pulled off headline-crabbing protests, and took signatures from rural Nepalese who'd been affected by the war on drugs the most. In 2017, they introduced a bill to legalize weed, and 54 MPs signed it.

Yeah, I've been a drug user openly, a drug user. You know, I'm living with HIV for over 20 years now. That's Rajiv. When I met him at Kathmandu Jazz Bar ahead of my trip with Joseph. So we have our drug policy wrong and we're trying to fix it. But it's a difficult thing because it involves very big people. And, you know, doing independently is not as easy as like protecting a person.

These days, it's surprising to find a Nepali politician who isn't in favour of legalising the drug. And leaders often stand up in parliament or appear on popular TV shows to argue how the war on drugs was a kind of cultural colonialism.

Here's Kanak. Nepal's economy as a whole has been impacted. Our tourism has been impacted. And our peace of mind has been impacted for doing something that has been historically, culturally sanctioned and now suddenly made illegal. Whereas the very societies that made Nepal go illegal, themselves are going into legalization. Talk about California.

Talk about various US states, talk about Thailand, talk about the various European countries. So what's going on here? The West makes Nepal make cannabis illegal, both its cultivation and its use, impacting the poorest of the poor. It also brings a huge pall of insecurity among those that who continue to use or to cultivate cannabis.

Meanwhile, the people who made us do it and their descendants in the West are willy-nilly legalizing it. So this cannot be. And that's why I was hitting the road with Joseph and Dipesh, traveling for 10 hours and 150 miles on day one, each of us coated in a thick black layer of filth. How are you feeling? I can't believe you just did that. That was insane.

It was still 30 miles to our destination, Tawang, the town that had once been the HQ of the Maoist uprising and whose farmers the war on drugs had hit hardest.

It was there, Joseph told me. We'd find the OG Purple Haze. So what are we having? What are we having? We'll have chicken curry. That's enough for me. Yeah? I'll eat anything. I'll eat anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's less than 30 miles. But as I'd soon find out, it would almost have been quicker to walk. I don't understand what he is talking, OK? Yeah. What he is singing, I don't know. I don't understand. But the flow of music, I know. I don't understand.

Even today, Nepal is the 10th biggest producer of cannabis resin in the world.

On day two, I swear Depeche tried smoking a lot. I counted over a dozen joints, a couple Havana-sized blunts, rolling them while driving, rolling them at rest stops and villages and backcountry restaurants. The guy is an absolute machine. Says he hit rock bottom a few years back, went out into the middle of nowhere to find himself, came back with a renewed focus on life and a goal to smoke weed from all over the country.

I was thinking like, like weed is medicine for me and in my meds, right? Yeah. So basically I was going to meet these guys all over from Nepal smoking and talking like, "Yeah, they have the best weed in the country." You know? I thought, then I went to meet these guys as well. Then when I get there, damn, the shit they're smoking is like, I don't know what they were smoking, you know? I'm like, "No way!"

look at this look at this head of anchors and like and then I knew they were not like some were smoking some were not smoking but they knew everything about the plant yeah how they can change the country I was not thinking about changing the country or anything you know I was just thinking like people like me in bipolar and all these things that it helped yeah I can help so that was my thing but when I met these guys they talked about country you know

I said, "Okay, if one plant can do all these things that we and these guys have planned, why not?" And I think, according to Mr. Bill Gates, he lets the hardest job to be done by the richest person, you know?

And so it went like this for a day, switching from Dipesh to Fred Durst to Joseph to Chester Bennington, philosophy and new metal and smoking and, oh yeah, the view. Rising up one side of the valley before heading down the other side into Tuvang. Skinny mountain passes, fuzzy green forest to one side, the Annapurna Massif to the other.

Peaks so tall that even here, thousands of feet up, with breath hard to take, I'm looking skywards at them. If there's a place to get baked, it's probably here. And even though I don't really smoke much myself, hotboxing in an SUV with Dipesh is enough for a pretty potent contact high. No, not for me. But...

Finally, at around 10pm on day 2, we rolled into Toulang. 30 miles in about 12 hours. Insane roads that would be completely unpassable in rainy season, and which almost were anyway. Finally here, man. You are amazing. It's been good.

This is my friend, Will. Hi, nice to meet you. My god, this car is covered in shit. Whoa. It's 10pm and we finally made it to the town of Tabang. It's buried deep in the Himalayan foothills. 23 hours of driving, the last few of which were on mud-logged tracks in darkness. Fog rolling in like we were drifting through some kind of purgatory. It was all pretty weird and tiring.

But actually that fog is what makes the local cash crop so famed around the world. It basks in mountainside sun all day and then sucks the moisture out of the fog at night. And that's what we're here to see after all, which is the purple haze, right? The stuff became a bartering tool for the rebels, the Maoists who fought civil war against the monarchy. And during those times, the guys told me the gunshots would actually ring out all night from the hilltops and the mountains above us where we are.

People are still scared to come to the bank today actually but I'm not really sure whether that's because it was the headquarters of those Maoists back in the day or if it's the hotel rooms. Honestly man this is probably the grimmest place I've stayed in a while. I might need to smoke myself before bed. Luckily the boys are next door and they're not short of a joint or two.

Joseph doesn't smoke, but Dishesh and this other guy, he never asked my name. I never asked his. They started at breakfast. Might not be the most comforting thing when you're peering down out the car window at certain death. Anyway, we made it. And tomorrow, if any luck, we'll be trekking up the mountains to see some real OG purple haze weed. Stuff that these folks hope might finally pull them out of poverty.

Because, I guess like me tonight, they don't have a pot to piss in, despite living in a place where there's riches literally sprouting right outside out of the earth. Yeah, that's me done. Catch you tomorrow. Now, Joseph, Dipesh, Rajiv, they're here to tell you that legalising weed solves everything. It doesn't.

Patchwork legislation from Australia to the US means that black market product still dominates, as does the violence that stems from it. The Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, for example, has never been stronger in marijuana production, and it continues to kill and destroy thousands of lives along the way. Despite what happened in the 1970s, Nepal still has a thriving black market in the drug, and that's unlikely to end anytime soon.

Because of other nations' tight import laws, Nepal can't just set up a billion-dollar industry overnight. Its artisanal experts have died out or left, and the king torched entire native strains. The crazy, evolved, high-THC strains you might get in a Denver or an Amsterdam dispensary? You're not going to find them in Nepal.

Most likely, the country will first have to concentrate on medical-grade marijuana, a global industry that's already worth over $14 billion worldwide. Then, when scientists and labs and storage facilities come to its rural areas, perhaps Nepal can build its legendary recreational market back from the ashes.

Here's US Israeli weed journalist and friend of the show, Ben Hartman. There's this constant desire to look for new kind of cool ways. How much can you really say about weed? It's like, okay, you can smoke it, you've got edibles, you've got gummies. They're still trying to think of a new niche, a new thing, a new whatever. And I guess when the market gets bigger and more saturated, I think that increases the

the need to people to try to come up with something new. It's like, how do you differentiate yourself when everybody's got great weed, you know, and everybody's chasing kind of the same strains or, you know what I mean? And, and the consumer is becoming more mature and more knowledgeable and you can't just wow them with like some, some herb, you know, so maybe like hash and temple balls and stuff like that. It would be new to like Americans or, or other people in a way that maybe it could work, you know what I mean? Like, uh, maybe, but it will take time. Lots of it.

But there are some things that legalization would improve overnight. Of 25,000 or so people in Nepal's jails, over a third are behind bars on drug charges. And almost all of them are poor growers or smugglers into India. And that definitely would change.

And there's an even bigger issue that a thriving wheat industry might just help reverse.

Last year, over 620,000 Nepalese left their nation to work in the Persian Gulf, mostly on the infrastructure behind Qatar's 2022 FIFA World Cup. Up to 6,000 of them have returned in body bags.

Most are from one-time weed growing villages like Tevang. On day three of my own trip into the foothills, I'd finally see the place up close and with it, hopefully some of Nepal's original purple haze.

No, that's fine. In the beginning, we also raised our hopes from the party. In that too, the people had a certain understanding of our values. If we win, we will open the bhangu. We will open the chariot. The people's...

100 yards away from this place I was staying at, this place is gorgeous around here. Surrounded by hills, the clouds are just sort of evaporating off the top of them. There's an old brick school building kids do in their ABCs and there's an old couple hoeing the garden behind them and there's just a couple of like, I don't know, 10, 12 feet high cannabis trees growing just regularly in the garden. I mean there's stuff everywhere.

Alright, so yeah, the whole place is sort of like located on the slope of a valley.

Joseph said there's 20,000 people living here, I'm not sure that's true. I think it seems way smaller than that, but maybe. What else should I be saying about this? Hello! The first thing that strikes you, after Joseph's singing that is,

is that this place is beautiful. Holy shit, is that all cannabis? Yep. A small tangle of tin-roofed homes surrounded by valleys and the snowy Himalayan peaks further off in the distance. It's cold at sunrise and that's when the sun starts to burn off fog that allows places like Tawang to act as natural hydroponic labs. About an hour after that and it's boiling hot. There's like dozens and dozens and dozens of trees.

And it's really not that hard to find the weed. The plants are everywhere. In the corners of fields, along paths, there's even a bunch right outside a school. What kind of stuff is this? This is basically, if you see, that can be used for clothes, you know, for textile. Oh, yeah, yeah.

None of the kids of these two farmers we met go to that though. They're part of the massive brain drain that continues emptying out places like Tabang years after the rebels left. Adding to the 1200 or so folks who lost their lives here in the conflict. These are the people the war on drugs hit hardest, whose homelands were gutted of plants and people. And they're the folks who, if marijuana is legalized again here, half a century later,

or they might just claw back an industry to call their own. And that's not that they don't grow it already. That is pungent. What he's saying is fucking too good to be true. Those are pigs. They stink a lot. Do you...

Do you smell? No. It's because of this weed. Everything's fucking covered. See? Yeah, yeah. Good trick. These two farmers we met, they said they still rub their weed into hash each year. But if the cops catch them, they'll get shaken down for a 20-buck bribe or get sent to prison. And that's a lot of money considering that a bus into the nearest town where people can sell their stuff, that costs up to 8 bucks a time. This is plant.

If they sell it, they will get money. Then these people have to be united for this. And they have to voice, one voice for here local government. They have to give pressure. That's what I'm telling to them.

Do they get trouble from the local government at all? Yeah. What the police says, it's a village. And inside the village, how you are growing this? This is illegal. Don't grow. They are illegal.

giving them threat the police what they do they treat them and by after treating also the plant grows the time comes for harvest or the robbing time no and when they see the live they doing they caught them and they ask them for the 10 to 20 000 give me otherwise you will go to the prison

Right. So it's like 20 bucks US. Yeah. How much can you make from harvesting all of this cannabis? If you go to the high range of mountain, you'll see all cannabis plant. And all over this Thabang, you will collect in one place, it's around like more than a crore. That's, a crore is like 100,000? Yeah. It's very cheap price.

They don't have any knowledge about the price also. Yeah, because that's what, $100? Yeah. You hear so much about the effects of the war on drugs on Americans, how people are locked up or killed, or sent to wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, or other places that can trace their own problems back to Nixon's 1971 speech, and of course, other things beside.

But these people, in the poorest corners of Nepal, they don't even have a voice, not even in their own country. The Nepali weed industry might be a ways off, but it's the biggest hope these guys will have to claw back the bayul in which they once lived, to bring it back to life. He's saying that we don't have the lab, no? The lab? Lab, to test it, either it is good or bad.

But by hearing from the other tourists and other people that Nepali gaja is number one gaja, they hear. They are asking if it will be legal, then it will be more blessing to us. Plant is more important than money. Why? They don't need money. But they...

They made clothes by the rope of this plant. Cannabis plant. They make rope, no? Hemp rope. Hemp. They make clothes like this. This is another one. But that time they used to make like this to cover our body. See this climate, so cold. And they need clothes, not money that time.

important is that. One bowl of wheat, three bowls of rice you get. Angry, I feel anger by hearing his story. What happened in the war time means like he was homeless now. The houses were burned by police because he was in Moest or in some party. He is in party

So they burned his house and minimum 1500 to 1600 house was burned at that time. And now he is staying in that small, that is also his wife's father and mother gave to him. And he is surviving like that. And nobody have got compensation.

from the government and very he he he says that i don't know i am alive or not i feel like that but there was just one more thing i wanted to see before we headed back out on the mountain road again the purple haze was it here well yes and no

So, plot twist. The purple haze is all over the place. I don't think we're going to have to try very hard to find the big purple buds. But the main stuff that grows here is now pink. And that's not because of legalisation. That's not because of farming techniques or the Maoists or the war or anything else. It's because of climate change. It's getting hotter here and it's producing a different kind of cannabis. Sativa, still. It's like a warm buzz, unreliably told.

but it's different so climate change is a plot twist in this entire thing who knew excuse me that girl

Before I left Nepal I wanted to come to one more place, Freak Street. I'd heard so much about the place, how it rose in the 60s and how it fell after the hippies were thrown out, but I hadn't actually been there myself. And if Freak Street was once the home of hippie culture worldwide, it definitely isn't now. The history is still amazing. It's just off the main Durbar, the square with all the temples,

There's birds and yogis and people offering up incense and other things to the gods. And those wood-fronted buildings from back in the day, they're all still standing. But a lot of them now have plastic signs advertising bubble tea bars and burger joints and third wave cafes and hostels for backpackers and little knick-knack stores but not a lot else.

I managed to speak to a few people, one of whom ran a little T-shirt store on the side of one of the corners. Foreigners should be here. We hope so. We also want to deal with you every time, but we don't get it. What about the partying and the nightlife? Is that still here? This place, after nine, this place is all closed. After nine, we cannot even open the shop. No nothing. Uh...

About the legalization of drugs here, it's a big question now. It looks like people are going to change the law. Yes. We think it should be changed because as far as I know, it's all been misused these days. But most of the younger people, they try it and misuse it. But it should be in a proper way. It should be legalized and legalized.

people like you should get to try it because this place is famous for it as far as I know this place is famous for it but it is not available here now it's completely changed the people are changed there are no old people here nobody old everything is changed even we want you to visit our place and feel free we don't get to see it there are many extremely few

these days foreigners but seeing to that previous era we do want that but Do you think it could come back? I think it should come back It will, I guess it will There are a lot of campaigns going on here and there I think it should

With a bit of political action and some more lobbying by Joseph, Dipesh and Rajiv, and others of course, perhaps the hippies, or even the grandkids of the hippies, can come back to Freak Street and breathe some weed-smelling life back into the place.

Here's Rajiv Kathle again. Here's Kanak.

I think it would be environmental, cultural, economic justice to bring back cannabis trade, cannabis usage to Kathmandu and to Nepal. As long as we ensure that the benefit is spread out and the poorest benefit.

After so much hurt, it would have at least made Joseph's own journey worthwhile. After legalization, things will change overnight. As soon as tourists arrive in Nepal, hotels will flourish, hospitals will run, foreign money will come into our country.

My family, my wife and son, everybody thought I was losing my mind. I told them, yes, but I'm not going to quit. After a few years, they began seeing me on the news, on social media, and more people were talking about weed. They slowly started respecting me. Things have changed.

Thanks for listening to this special episode of the Underworld Podcast and a massive thanks to Dale, the wizard, for putting this whole thing together. We'll be back next week. Don't Instagram your crimes.

Life is a piece of cake

Nahidi, come to me, please don't come to me

No, we're not going to do it.