Stream It Or Skip It: ‘National Geographic Investigates: Legal Marijuana In America’ on Hulu, Where The Verdict Is Inconclusive

National Geographic Investigates: Legal Marijuana In America: The New Green Rush is a long way of saying this docuseries on Hulu compares and contrasts the current climate for legal weed in the US against the roots of the movement, and how the cannabis industry has grown and changed since early medical marijuana wins like California Proposition 215 in 1996. Grown? Definitely. In more ways than one. Changed? Totally. But the same old issues prevail. 

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATES: LEGAL MARIJUANA IN AMERICA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “Cannabis,” a narrator says over time lapse photography of weed as it grows. “Arguably the most controversial plant in history.” Did a 1970s high school guidance counselor write this?

The Gist: The New Green Rush bounces that public health film-like intro off a supercut of weed paranoia in America. Reefer Madness, newsreel footage of Nixon, Nancy Reagan, and snippets of “War on Drugs” propaganda: clearly, the establishment has been poo poo on the dank for a while. 

It’s that same stigma that has stymied efforts to legalize weed at the federal level, a fact that, as this doc observes, hasn’t really changed in nearly 30 years, even with the snowball of state legalizations. (The New Green Rush presents the medical and recreational state tallies at 37 and 21, respectively.) Nat Geo then goes into its own archives to present the issue as it existed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where we meet various players in California’s independent grower and activist communities. People like Tim Blake and Steve DeAngelo, each of them lifers who have guided the cannabis conversation for decades. 

“The older cats who’ve been doing things for 20, 30 years, they’re tired,” Blake says in a decades-old clip. “They’ve been ostracized. They want to come out and be political. They want to be a part of society. They never wanted to leave in the first place.” And in another piece of archival footage, DeAngelo says that people getting involved in legalizing weed who are exclusively about cashing in are missing the point.

Has the trend toward legalization made for any positives? The answer The New Green Rush seems to come around to is some, but not enough, and still with plenty of stigma attached. And nowadays, activists like DeAngelo have focused their energies on social justice issues like expunging the criminal records of nonviolent drug offenders.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The issues of regulation and the intersection of legal and illegal markets for commodities that The New Green Rush touches on are explored with greater depth in another Nat Geo docuseries on Hulu, Trafficked with Mariana Van Zeller. And for a lighter look at the ongoing expansion of the legal cannabis industry, there’s always Growing Belushi on Discovery.  

Our Take: “Derek continues to navigate the weed business through different companies. Dar pleaded no contest to defrauding Oakland and is now a social media influencer.” A line like this is docuseries gold. But National Geographic Investigates: Legal Marijuana In America: The New Green Rush only briefly introduces Derek and Dar and their early 2000s weed store IPO hustle before cutting back to the present and moving on. And that editing decision is part of the issue with this docuseries, an issue that has surfaced in other Nat Geo content on Hulu, as well: these programs don’t clearly delineate their timelines. Footage and interviews from the archives can fill fully half of an episode’s run time, but not totally connect to the story Nat Geo is reporting in the present. Just like the weird weed journey of Derek and Dar, pieces of the archival stuff can feel tangential to the topic at best, and utterly siloed at worst. 

What all of this ultimately feels like is that tantalizing or newsmaking pieces of old footage that Nat Geo had in its vault are being grafted onto survey versions of contemporary reporting, to create a hybridized, refurbished product that can grab some eyes from the trending true crime model. (This has been an issue with Netflix, too, with its glut of overstretched docs.) There is quality information to be had in The New Green Rush. But there could be considerably more of it.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: “This is primarily an issue of justice and freedom,” concludes Morgan Fox, political director for NORML. With all of the distance between federal and state cannabis regulations, individuals like Fox and Steve DeAngelo, as well as the groups they represent, are found to be pivoting toward the social justice component of the ongoing argument.

Sleeper Star: We gotta go with Tim Blake here, the grower in California’s Emerald Triangle region who we meet first with wild hair and then a cleaner cut look later, as his effort to standardize cannabis in his state as a environmentally sound commodity for independent growers undergoes a major shift in optics. 

Most Pilot-y Line: Dani Walton, former chief of sales at the California outfit Agris Farms, lays the difficulties that face smaller legal operators. “The fact that the customer is paying anywhere between 20 to 36% in tax, what other industry do you pay for that? I mean, alcohol is not taxed that way, cigarettes are not taxed that way. That’s going to push everything back to the black market, and that’s what we’re dealing with – over-regulation, over-taxation – and it’s killing anyone that has a legal license, that’s trying to at least do this correctly.” 

Our Call: STREAM IT, but perhaps only as a survey. National Geographic Investigates: Legal Marijuana In America: The New Green Rush offers an overview of a topic that’s definitely trending, but can’t fully connect its archival side with its contemporary reporting. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges