Higher education: Here are 5 of the best documentaries about weed out now

Breaking Habits, Vudu

Alright, so as a documentary, Breaking Habits is not without its faults. The pacing is disjointed (pun not intended) and the editing choices are occasionally confusing. That said, the characters are absolutely wild. You thought Joe Exotic was bananas? Meet Sister Kate, a self-anointed nun who, after spending her life as a Reagan Republican, became a marijuana grower once her secretly polygamist husband conned her out of her life savings.

Sister Kate — who, in her previous life as a communications professional, was known as Christine Meeusen — started a new life in Merced, California with her three children after her marriage inevitably blew up. After some starts and stops in trying to get a medical marijuana business off the ground, Sister Kate found success once she donned a nun’s habit and had all the women she employed do the same. Despite having no ties to the Catholic Church, she dubbed the group the Sisters of the Valley and fashioned herself as an “anarchist, activist nun.”

She isn’t the only big character in Breaking Habits. There’s her son, a former methamphetamine addict who is currently on an all-you-can-smoke marijuana treatment program devised by the Sisters. There’s a staunchly anti-weed pastor who cautions parishioners that smoking could very well cost them their immortal souls, a message that is only reinforced by the local sheriff.

What Breaking Habits lacks in nuance, it makes up for in drama. Come for the weed puns, stay for the gunfight (!) that has the weed nuns grabbing their rifles.

Murder Mountain, Netflix

Murder Mountain is where true crime and the dark side of cannabis culture meet. Roughly 60% of America’s weed comes from Northern California’s Humboldt County — a place where more people go missing than anywhere else in the state. “Have You Seen Me?” and “Missing” posters are plastered all over the central town, Alderpoint, which is surrounded by dense forests and rocky peaks, an ideal terrain for “disappearing” people.

It’s prevalent enough that the slope on which Alderpoint sits is referred to as Murder Mountain, which is largely known as a hub for seasonal marijuana farm workers. In this six-episode docuseries director Joshua Zeman takes a deep dive into how precarious the transient environment is for so-called “trimmigrants,” like 29-year-old Garret Rodriguez, a surfer from San Diego who traveled north to participate in the green rush and earn money for a Mexico beach shack.

In 2013, Rodriguez stopped responding to calls from his father, who then reports his son missing. However, the sheriff’s department is overwhelmed with missing persons and murder cases, and Rodrguez’s disappearance goes unsolved as police allegedly dismisses him as a “loser” and “drug dealer.” One townsperson summed up the local government’s opinion on the local marijuana growers as such: “Let them kill each other.”

Part murder mystery, part indictment of how America’s law enforcement has adapted (or not) to marijuana legalization, Murder Mountain is worth the six-hour binge.