Pot for Profit: Cannabis Legalization, Racial Capitalism, and the Expansion of the Carceral State (original) (raw)
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Crime & Delinquency, 2023
This study examines how regulated cannabis businesses normalize their trade in the United States. Using interviews (N = 56) and a cross-sectional survey of cannabis professionals (N = 144), I find that the U.S. cannabis industry employs three strategies: (1) Using deviant practices to engage in legitimate business, (2) Reconciling divergent cultural frames for reducing stigma against the cannabis industry, and (3) Changing discursive repertoires that uniquely stigmatize cannabis and cannabis users. I argue that each strategy constitutes a new analytical category of social skill that contested industries leverage in a gray market context.
Cannabis Capitalism in Colorado: An Ethnography of Il/legal Production and Consumption
2021
Coloradans have changed their fundamental views on illegal substances since the decriminalization of cannabis in Colorado. Since the legalization of medical cannabis in 2014, state-sold dispensary cannabis products have straddled the line between legal and illegal network systems in a hybridized "il/legal" market system, a term designed to be ambiguous of the formal and informal economies that it represents (Nordstrom 2007, xxvii). The cannabis commodity chain has proved both familiar and strange when it comes to its production, consumption, and distribution of a federally illegal substance. Colorado's history as a pioneer in culture and legislature has been repeated with cannabis legalization and provides a unique experience that cannot be replicated, drawing in tourists who produce income for the state. This il/legal experimentation will both prove vital in finding the market homeostasis of cannabis nationwide, but also, to see how Colorado's unique cannabis regulatory system affects this specific population's socioeconomic lifeway. This dissertation focuses on ethnographic research from the perspective of the Colorado dispensary "budtender," an ambiguous role that has taken on different valuemeanings depending on the state, system, and context, and it explores how these workers conceptualize their role in the cannabis commodity chain. Ethnographic methods proposed in this study lend well in explaining the relationship between regulation, tourism, and civil society, as well as documenting the transitionary period of Colorado history. This dissertation contributes to the literature by providing an ethnographic account of how budtenders navigate a newly formed economic sector and provides a starting point to collaborate with agencies to find practical solutions to the hardships workers face in the cannabis industry.
Surveillance, Social Control, and Managing Semi-Legality in U.S. Commercial Cannabis
Social Problems
This article presents a case study of commercial cannabis in the United States. Drawing on 56 interviews with cannabis stakeholders collected between 2018-2020, I examine how different governmentalities of surveillance became distorted by the contradiction between state and federal cannabis laws. As in other regulated markets, these governmentalities informed state-sponsored surveillance initiatives to stop, contain, or support certain forms of deviance by commercial cannabis businesses. Due to fragmented governance, the efficacy of these initiatives depended in part upon the actions of the regulated cannabis industry. Commercial cannabis businesses looked to how surveillance was configured to develop strategies that could help them overcome challenges stemming from their semi-legality. These strategies included incorporating practices that were not required by law, partnering with the state in surveillance efforts, and engaging in activities to combat the black market. I argue that the embedded relationship between governmentalities, surveillance initiatives, and commercial cannabis activities transformed these strategies into mechanisms through which structure emerged in this nascent market. This paper introduces a set of surveillance categories, proposes new directions for research on social control and markets, and offers a novel study of commercial cannabis that can help to explain the trajectory of this market.
"Bounded Equity: The Limits of Economic Models of Social Justice in Cannabis Legislation"
Social equity provisions in cannabis legislation are premised on the hope that the profit generated around adult-use cannabis can be leveraged to ameliorate the damage done by racially biased enforcement of prohibition in black and brown communities. As such, they encapsulate an attempt to reconcile the history of racism in the enforcement of cannabis law through its new future as a profit generating commodity. These programs are gaining traction, but with minimal empirical examination. The development and implementation of these programs raises a number of questions in need of study that we outline in this paper. We argue that Creary's concept of bounded justice-which critiques the inherent limitations of social justice projects that ignore structural forms of social exclusion-can provide a framework for critical understanding of the limitations of such programs, ethnographically grounded empirical research, and a framework for evaluating the justice impacts of legislation. Specifically, we argue that in order to interrogate the possibilities for social justice projects around cannabis, we must address equity at a deeper level by working with communities to investigate hyperlocalized and historical factors that have influenced systems and structures.
2012
ABSTRACTThomas R. HeddlestonFrom The Frontlines to the Bottom Line: Medical Marijuana, the War On Drugs, and the Drug Policy Reform MovementThe medical marijuana movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1990s in a climate of official repression. This movement represents the most successful branch of the forty-year old drug policy reform movement. Using oral histories, participant observation, and archival research this dissertation explores the genesis, growth, and transformation of the medical marijuana movement in California from 1990 until 2012. I theorize the longevity of prohibitionist ideology over the course of the twentieth century in chapter one. Chapter two narrates the social history of the drug policy reform movement and its three branches; marijuana policy reform, harm reduction, and anti-prohibitionism. The three branches are characterized by diversification, as new organizations form to pursue different areas of drug policy reform, and competition for...
How can organizations use strategic frames to develop support for illegal and stigmatized markets? Drawing on interviews, direct observation, and the analysis of 2,497 press releases, I show how pro-cannabis activists used distinct framing strategies at different stages of institutional development to negotiate the moral boundaries surrounding medical cannabis, diluting the market’s stigma in the process. Social movement organizations first established a moral (and legal) foothold for the market by framing cannabis as a palliative for the dying, respecting moral boundaries blocking widespread exchange. As market institutions emerged, activists extended this frame to include less serious conditions, making these boundaries permeable.
University of Massachusetts Law Review, 2024
States increasingly implement “social equity” programs as an element of new cannabis regulations; however, these programs routinely fail to achieve their goals and frequently exacerbate the inequities they purport to solve, leaving inequitable industries, high incarceration rates, and broken communities in their wake. This ineffectiveness is due to the industry’s fundamental confusion of the modern, individualized concept of “equity” with the historical, society-level concept of “social equity.” In this paper, I develop a new theory of “cannabis social equity” to integrate these concepts, and I apply that theory, first, to diagnose why current policies fall short and, second, to propose a new approach to social equity that can remedy the inequities in both the emerging industry and in the populations most adversely affected by the War on Drugs. Through a historiography of the definition of social equity in the cannabis industry, I show how legislators, regulators, advocates, and scholars built the modern definition of social equity by replacing the rich, process-based theories of racial, social, and restorative justice with a narrow set of policies crafted more for narrative resonance than effectiveness. As I argue in a companion article published in the Fall 2023 issue of the University of Massachusetts Law Review, these policies will continue to fail to improve equity in the new industry, bring equitable justice to the previously incarcerated, redistribute resources to inequitably impacted communities, and provide equitable access to cannabis. In contrast, the field of public administration developed the original theory of social equity in the 1970s to provide a philosophical foundation and process for using the mechanisms of program administration and public participation to address societal inequities, not just those inequities created explicitly or implicitly through policy implementation. I extend the traditional theory to include a legislative component that broadens potential solutions by centering the development of cohesive regulatory schema rather than individual policies. I apply the new theory to produce a novel solution that uses the level of legalization as an organizing principle for legislation inpursuit of both implementation equity in the new industry and societal justice for the victims of the War on Drugs. For if all we ask for is equity, there will never be justice.
Weed, Need and Greed: A study of domestic cannabis cultivation
2010
Weed, Need and Greed explores the pheonomenon of domestic cannabis cultivation and examines its impact on the wider cannabis market. Drawing predominantly on 10 years of ethnographic research with cannabis growers, the result is a description of cannabis cultivation, and cannabis cultivators, in the industrialised world. The book explores how cannabis is grown. Most cannabis in Western countries is grown indoors with increasingly hi-tech cultivation methods being utilised. The methods employed by individual growers will depend on their opportunities, their intentions and, importantly, any ideological position which may influence their choice. It also explores who is involved in cannabis growing. Growers come from a wide range of backgrounds, but many share common 'ideological' traits that are rooted in an affiliation to a wider cannabis culture. A typology of cannabis growers i offered based on motivation and ideology. The key point here is that a large number of cannabis growers seek no financial reward whatsoever for their involvement in what is essentially an act of drug trafficking. Other growers do make money, but are equally motivated by non-financial 'drivers'. Still others are mostly or entirely driven by financial considerations. These growers often display the same hallmarks as drug-trafficking oufits. Consumer concerns can be seen to influence the market with smaller independent 'social' and 'social/commercial' growers offering an ideological - ethical, even - alternative to larger scale organised crime outfits. Finally, explanations for the recent surges in domestic cannabis cultivation seen all over the Western world are offered along with predictions for the future of domestic production not just of cannabis but other drugs as well.