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,hydro tray 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, 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.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, planting table 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.My in-depth study of drug policy reform at both the organizational and practical levels required me to branch beyond the traditional methods of quantitative sociology. I sought to get the inside story from insiders’ perspectives, to construct new categories of analysis, and to use these categories to understand the ever developing phenomenon of drug policy change. Since the data I sought was not amenable to quantitative analysis, I eschewed surveys, secondary data analysis and structured interviews. To conduct this study I employed four main types of research methods; participant observation at cannabis dispensaries, drug policy reform conferences, organization meetings, and festivals, depth interviews with activists and organization leaders, archival research of movement websites and literature, and archival research of media coverage of drug reform modalities and movement outcomes. I also analyzed state response to this movement as conveyed through official documents and news sources.
As my project progressed, I used the Internet to explore how the movement uses social networking sites to connect activists to one another and to coordinate new forms of Internet based action. My ultimate goal for this research project is to construct a coherent historical narrative of the drug policy reform and medical marijuana movements. Because I sought to create a narrative, qualitative methods were well suited to my task. At the beginning of the process, I needed to look at existing sources on my topic to discover where I needed to fill in the blanks. My use of theory and method was hybrid in form. Because of my exploratory orientation, I intended to deviate from the deductive, theory testing, orientation that guides much quantitative work in sociology Although I did not intend my study to be exclusively generative of entirely novel “grounded theory” , I also did not completely eschew existing theoretical work in the sociology of social movements and sociology of drugs. Instead I used a dialectic approach employing existing theories from the study of social movements to guide my initial research, and a grounded theory orientation to new data I found that augmented, stretched and contradicted existing theory. This qualitative approach is well suited to my purposes of constructing a narrative of drug policy reform from the viewpoints of its participants, and presenting a study that is amenable to the goals of public sociology . To map the distribution of the wider drug policy reform movement, initially I examined movement documents, literature from conferences and organization websites to discover and catalog the various organizations that comprise the movement. This aspect of my project gave me an understanding of the various concerns that motivate organizations in the movement, its organizational bases, and the number and size of organizations involved in the wider movement. Through cataloging the various organizations that comprise the movement, I was also able see the geographical distribution of movement organizations. The websites of drug policy reform organizations will also provide an understanding of the way that movement actors frame their concerns and goals, and which symbols and values they use to animate their activism. Recently, social networking websites including “Facebook” have afforded activists with new venues for networking and engaging in lobbying activities. Internet based activism has included organizing boycotts of corporations unsympathetic to drug use, petitioning government officials and Congressional representatives, and keeping members abreast of organizational campaigns. In addition to linking participants to one another and keeping them informed about movement activities, social networking sites also offer activists a platform for lobbying politicians and publicizing their efforts. I will include an examination of these websites to assess the breadth of activity in this movement. The primary research method I used to conduct my research was participant observation. As noted above, I have participated in drug policy reform for over ten years. Throughout this study I also directly participated in a particular modality of drug policy reform, working in a medical cannabis dispensary. By working as an employee in a medical cannabis dispensary, I was able to experience first hand what became a central discovery of my research, the hybrid character of the medical marijuana movement .