The Sisters of the Valley are nuns who grow pot. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it, even if they aren't really nuns. But the way they see it, if schools can call pizza a veggie, they can call themselves nuns.
They belong to a highly specialized and devout order, one dedicated to cultivating cannabis and using it to create salves, tinctures, and oils for the ill. Sure, Sister Kate and Sister Darcy raise and harvest the crop according to the cycles of the moon and dress in a distinctly homespun manner, but that doesn't diminish the importance of their work.
Photographers Shaughn Crawford and John DuBois heard about the Sisters---whose real names are Christine Meeusen and Darcy Johnson---last fall and knew they had to meet them. "They’re nuns that smoke weed," Crawford says. "It’s a very unique version of an already unique thing." The photographers visited them at their home in Merced County, California, where they tend to plants growing in the garage and the salves and tinctures bubbling on the stove.
These nuns who aren't nuns are part of a rapidly growing industry. Marijuana has emerged from the shadows in recent years as a growing number of states legalize medicinal---and even recreational---use, attracting Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and people eager to make marijuana a big business.
The Sisters aren't looking to get rich, though. They just want to help people manage their pain. Sister Kate, 55, discovered the medicinal properties of marijuana more than decade ago, when a doctor suggested using it to treat the symptoms of menopause. In 2008, she opened a medical cannabis collective, delivering marijuana to terminally ill patients, many of whom had never smoked a joint. That got her thinking about alternatives, like tinctures and salves. “The fact that old dying people were asking me to teach them how to light a pipe made me kind of crazy,” she says. “I would think, ‘One of these days somebody’s going to torch themselves.’”
Kate became Sister Kate during the Occupy Movement in 2011 after growing increasingly frustrated by it all---"the fracking … Citizens United … Walmart." But then she heard that Congress said schools could call pizza a vegetable, and decided enough is enough. “I said, ‘Damn it, if pizza is a vegetable, I am a nun.’” (Congress didn't actually say pizza is a vegetable.)
Sister Kate started attending Occupy protests dressed as a nun, and the habit stuck long after the Occupy movement faded. She founded Sisters of the Valley last year, producing salves and tinctures. She uses cannabis high in cannabidiol, a chemical touted for medicinal properties, and low in THC, the psychoactive compound that creates the high. She quickly amassed a following on Facebook and hired Sister Darcy, 25, to help with production.
Crawford and DuBois spent a day with them in February, watching them work. Their small house is decorated with religious trinkets and shmaltzy pictures line shelves and windowsills, alongside traditional weed paraphernalia you might find in a college dorm. The Sisters ritually burn sage bundles, play spiritual music, and pray to something they call the universal power of the divine good intention. “We’re asking for blessings on the medicine so it will do more than take away pain but that it will also heal,” Sister Kate says, “that it doesn’t get abused, that it doesn’t end up in false hands, that it travels safely, that kind of thing.”
The women have since moved into a small farm a few miles from the house (even though Merced County has banned the cultivation and sale of medical marijuana), and the photographers hope to visit once they’ve settled in. Whatever happens, the photographers aren’t likely to forget the 10 hours they spent with a couple of cannabis-growing nuns. As Crawford says, “I think we walked away smiling and scratching our heads, like, ‘What just happened?’"
