If you’re dying to know all there is to know about marijuana, “Weediquette” on Viceland explores it from every possible angle. From talks with potrepreneurs, to parents getting ahold of medical marijuana to treat their child’s cancer, to people who’ve served lengthy prison sentences for marijuana possession, the documentary series is well-researched, intelligent and human.
Its host, journalist Krishna Andavolu, reveals that the show started out as a web series on vice.com and bloomed into a TV show after a conversation with Viceland’s co-president, Spike Jonze.
“I was telling him about how in the web series, I went to Uruguay to interview the president because they legalized pot and had to tell my mom that I smoked weed on camera for the first time,” he recalls. “She didn’t take it very well.”
Andavolu, who describes himself as coming from a traditional Indian-American family that “doesn’t do drugs or drink,” says that his journalistic experiences with marijuana, compared to his upbringing, represent a “a little microcosm for what the country’s going through” with weed.
Luckily, after watching the past two seasons of the show, his parents have become much more educated on the subject and, consequently, more open-minded.
“Now they’re like, ‘It is a totally appropriate medicine in some circumstances and should be researched more. No one should go to jail for it,’” Andavolu notes. “If you can convince my Indian-American parents that pot might not be a bad thing, I think you can convince a lot of people.”
So what can we expect from Season 3 of “Weediquette”? One of the episodes investigates the distribution of marijuana from a legal market to an illegal market.
“In places like California, it’s totally legal and production is sky-high there, but as a result, more pot is flowing into the black market and being shipped across country to [places like] New York. We follow a shipment of illegal weed from California to New York,” he says. “It’s an all-American road trip, just with 45 pounds of pot in the car.”
Just for the record, however, Andavolu isn’t actually in the vehicle for the journey.
“Legal wouldn’t allow me to do that,” he admits.
Season 3 of “Weediquette” premieres on April 19 on Viceland at 10 p.m.
