While they have often been critical of drug policy, these scholars have rarely had the opportunity to analyze how drug policy becomes more liberal. The emergence and growth of medical cannabis in California presents a unique case of drug policy becoming less punitive. Consequently, it provides me with interesting questions as a scholar of drug policy change. Until the latter half of the 2000s, academics have not afforded medical marijuana the same amount of attention as harm reduction. Studies of marijuana policy often focus on legislative and judicial arenas , but do not discuss the role of individual actors in initiating marijuana policy change. Blain provides the only scholarly analysis of the drug policy reform movement in a paper he presented at the World Congress of Sociology conference in 2002. He details the emergence of the “antidrug war campaign” and looks at the strategies that the Lindesmith Center and the Drug Policy Foundation put forward at their 2001 meeting. Blain’s work has been very helpful in providing me with background information and avenues of inquiry to guide my research, ebb and flow rolling benches but I seek to provide more details about the evolution of drug policy reform and the success of medical marijuana. Three detailed analyses of medical marijuana in California introduce some of the issues that I seek to explore further. In Waiting to Inhale, Journalist Alan Bock provides extensive coverage of the campaign to pass Proposition 215 in California, from the initiative’s drafting, to making the ballot, to passage in November of 1996.
After passage, Bock gives great details about the struggles of early activists to implement the initiative and the counter-attack of federal law enforcement. His emphasis on regional variations in the governance of medical marijuana provides me with a key insight to organize my analysis of local differences in chapter 5. Bock’s history ends in 2000, however, which leaves me with numerous subsequent events to systematically incorporate into my narrative. Historian, Kathleen Ferraiolo analyzes how drug policy reformers used the ballot initiative process and issue framing to circumvent Federal intransigence with regard to medical marijuana in California and other states. With co-author Richard Webb, sociologist Wendy Chapkis address many of the philosophical and political issues and debates that bound the idea and provision of medical marijuana. Ultimately, Chapkis and Webb, present an intimately detailed ethnography of the WoMen’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a medical marijuana collective in Santa Cruz, California. Although the work of Bock, Ferraiolo, and Chapkis and Webb provide me with rich background material, analyses, and concepts to build on, they leave me with plenty of questions about the growth of medical marijuana, the role of the wider movement for drug policy reform and future directions for reformers. Bock’s work is detailed but not systematic. I seek to build on his ideas by incorporating concepts and insights from social movement theory. I also seek to incorporate the ten years of medical marijuana in California that Bock does not cover.
While Chapkis and Webb present an exquisitely detailed ethnography of a small-scale medical marijuana cooperative, they do little to contextualize the cooperative they study as but one form of medical marijuana provision in California. The narrowness of their focus does not address the role of the wider movement for medical marijuana, or the wider movement for drug policy reform. Ferraiolo’s scholarly work provides some interesting insights by using the concepts of direct democracy and issue framing, but like many treatments of the medical marijuana movement, she does not address the important role that activists and organizations play in instituting and defending medical marijuana “on the ground.” In addition to building on, and contributing to the field of drug policy studies and the growing literature on medical marijuana, I draw on social movement studies. Classical works, including Marx’s class-based analysis of the Paris commune and LeBon’s The Crowd, have cast a long shadow on the field, defining central problems and providing fuel for debate. In North America, scholars used the social psychological lens of collective behavior until the 1960s , when resource mobilization theory and Olson’s rational actor approach displaced this orientation. Political process theory sprang from resource mobilization in the 1970s . It provided the dominant framework for U.S. sociologists throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s . Essentially, political process theory emphasizes the importance of political, legal, and cultural contexts in shaping the outcomes that social movements achieve.
Many of the insights and concepts of political process theory guide my analysis of the drug policy reform and medical marijuana movements in the middle chapters of this dissertation. Eventually new social movements theory, which began in Europe in the early 1980s, and the cultural turn in the social sciences would influence social movement scholarship in the U.S. The latest currents in the field have been the emotional turn and the study of global social movements . Throughout this dissertation I will be synthesizing various strains of social movement theory to analyze the development of the drug policy reform movement, the sites where it constitutes itself, the features of the medical marijuana movement within it, and the transition of medical marijuana from a social movement to a hybrid of movement and industry. In this dissertation, I explore the origin, development and growth of the medical cannabis phenomenon in California. Medical cannabis is the most significant change to drug policy since the United States formally prohibited cannabis in the 1930s. Essentially, the medical marijuana phenomenon represents the most successful movement outcome for the wider drug policy reform movement. Movement outcomes have received relatively little attention from social movement scholars, who have focused on issues of movement emergence, recruitment, elite benefactors, and political context . The emergence of medical cannabis at the height of the War on Drugs is quite remarkable, and leads to several research questions that guide the organization of this dissertation. The relative success of the medical marijuana movement demonstrates that drug policy reform is possible, but very difficult to achieve. The movement highlights the power that opponents of reform wield in maintaining the regime of prohibition. This section uses political process theory to first account for the factors that contributed to the initial development of medical marijuana in the Bay Area. Next it looks at how activists shape political opportunity structures in different parts of the state, and who differing structures lead to different outcomes with regard to medical marijuana dispensaries. Using a diverse set of qualitative research methods, I address this set of research questions to provide a comprehensive view of one specific type of drug policy reform. My goal is to first situate the medical cannabis movement historically, within the context of nearly a century of drug prohibition and four decades of drug policy reform. Next I seek to situate the movement for drug policy reform spatially, rolling grow benches by observing the sites where participants in the movement are active and where the movement largely takes place. Third, I analyze the components of the political opportunity structure of the San Francisco Bay Area, and how they contribute to the nascent movement in the early 1990s. Fourth, I compare the political opportunity structures for medical cannabis in three California cities, noting how activists have influenced the structure of opportunity. Finally, I account for how the movement has changed into a hybrid and what that change entails for the future of the movement and social movement theory. Originally, my central research question was, how did the medical marijuana movement begin, grow and change, and how has the state responded? I also wanted to examine the relationship between the drug policy reform movement and medical marijuana in California. My original point of departure was based on the episteme of dependent and independent variables. I hypothesized that the drug policy reform movement was the independent variable and that phenomenon of medical marijuana was the dependent variable. I sought to measure the influence of the drug policy reform movement on the form and character of medical marijuana. After seven years of fieldwork as a participant observer in various aspects of the medical marijuana movement, I have revised this antiquated image of variables for an approach premised on the dynamic and dialectical relationship between the phenomenon of medical marijuana and the drug policy reform movement.
While the DPRM played a key role in the expansion of medical marijuana from the San Francisco Bay Area to the entire state of California in 1995 and 1996, its role was only critical during the ballot initiative process. Shortly thereafter, medical marijuana began to have a pronounced impact on the drug policy reform movement. It changed the movement’s focus, enlisted new participants and constituents , altered its priorities and most important, provided the movement with its first major success story since the mid 1970s. After the electoral success of Proposition 215, the national organization Americans for Medical Rights formed to export the ballot initiative approach to other states where it became a viable avenue for the legalization of medical marijuana. Newer organizations, including Americans for Safe Access, formed in response to emergent challenges faced by medical cannabis patients and dispensaries. I seek to move beyond other academic and journalistic treatments of medical marijuana that treat the electoral success of proposition 215 as the end point in the struggle for medical marijuana. From my field research, I’ve discovered that the provision of medical cannabis is an ongoing process. It requires an extended commitment to both political activism and direct action. While legal change is a necessary first step in implementing drug policy reform, it takes dedicated action on the part of organizations, cannabis providers and local governments to allow for the existence of cultivation and dispensaries “on the ground.” Because of ongoing opposition to medical cannabis on the part of federal law enforcement agencies, new drug policy modalities have to be constantly defended and protected. I theorize the implementation of a new system for cannabis provision as an outcome of the drug policy reform movement. By theorizing the provision of medical marijuana as a movement outcome, I seek to shed light on a lesser-studied aspect of social movements, how movements contribute to both institutional and cultural change. The provision of medical marijuana through collectives and storefront dispensaries is a profound departure from the regime of punitive prohibition, where the production and consumption of marijuana are relegated to the illicit market and hidden from public view. By opening up a novel system for the production and consumption of cannabis to state and public scrutiny, the medical cannabis movement has profoundly altered the cultural representation of cannabis, transforming the plant from dangerous to therapeutic. While I draw extensively from political process theory to explain the shape of the medical marijuana movement’s success in changing the legal and institutional status of cannabis, the movement has also had a profound effect on the cultural status of the substance. To theorize the provision of cannabis as a movement outcome, I define medical cannabis collectives and dispensaries, as “modalities of reform.” These modalities are characterized by physical locations, and a set of practices that participants engage in to provide cannabis in a licit manner. Although lobbying, organizing, and other social movement activities may occur at such sites, the primary purpose of such modalities is the provision of cannabis. To answer this set of research questions I will draw on social movement theory and six years of qualitative fieldwork in the overlapping medical marijuana and drug policy reform movements. My study first looks at the history and discourse of drug prohibition, then the history of the drug policy reform movement and the specific sites where the movement occurs. Next, I will examine the medical marijuana movement. For analytical purposes, I have divided the movement into three distinct phases, birth, development, and fruition. The first, or birth, phase looks at how the movement originated in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the specific features of that region that contributed to its formation. This stage lasts from roughly 1990 to 1996. Next, I look at the development of the movement, how it spread outward from the Bay Area and the different approaches to medical marijuana taken by activists, providers and officials in different parts of California. This stage lasts from 1997 to 2009. Thirdly, I will examine how the medical marijuana movement has transformed into an industry.