There are many rare social facts, but some become pathological based due to their infrequency, and others do not. Why is that so? To tailor the Durkheimian theory and make it more suitable for my empirical analysis, I incorporate Mary Douglas’s idea of pollution and power. Rather than speaking about pathological forms, Douglas focuses on marginal conditions. Her basic premise is that objects, practices, behaviors, and ideas that do not fit the existing social classifications are considered polluting, impure, and even dangerous and thus should be separated . Managing spatiality is a technique of power that allows the legitimate authority to reject “inappropriate” elements and protect what it deems normal, natural, and right. In this paradigm, space is not value-free but constructed through politics and power relations. Take, for example, racial segregation, building the wall to isolate immigrants, hot spot policing, skid rows, mental hospitals, jails and prisons—in all these cases, devaluation of individuals involves their spatial separation. Socio-spatial stigmatization is a mutually constitutive process, in which places inherit the stigma of persons, but persons also can be stigmatized through their interaction with places . For instance, concentrating homeless shelters into specific areas of a town tends to reinforce the stigmatized understanding of such areas. In similar ways, the stigma attached to a homeless shelter extends to individuals using it.Those who live in areas with a high concentration of “disordered” facilities, practices, and individuals tend to oppose them physically, ideologically, and discursively . For example, in his research of addiction treatment clinics in Toronto, Christopher Smith shows that residents perceive these facilities as a threat to the productive places and try to enforce certain socio-spatial borders .
Previous research showed that medical cannabis drying trays dispensaries were more likely to be located in less desirable parts of a neighborhood, characterized by high poverty level, unemployment, and homelessness . However, we know very little about the recreational cannabis facilities: Are they perceived as a “matter out of place”? Do they blur, contradict, and otherwise confuse the moral and social order of the communities? This study investigates the extent to which cannabis is normalized in California. Normalization is a barometer of changes in social behavior and cultural perspectives . Drawing from the Thomas theorem—stating that if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences—I suggest that if cannabis is conceived as legitimate, it will not be pushed to the geographical and/or social margins. By the same token, if it is viewed as dangerous and illegitimate, then cannabis dispensaries will be regarded as sites of contagion, which are to be marginalized and isolated. I conduct a regression analysis to identify factors that explain variations in cannabis practices at the city level. In particular, I examine the relationship between the support of cannabis legalization in California cities and the number of cannabis licenses issued by local governments. Following the normalization theory, I expect that cities whose residents supported cannabis legalization are more likely to permit legal cannabis dispensaries within their borders. If residents view cannabis as legitimate and socially acceptable, local governments will favor cannabis-related activities on their territories. I also expect homogeneity in the characteristics of cities whose citizens supported cannabis legalization and those that permitted cannabis businesses. For example, if cities whose residents voted for cannabis legalization have a higher percentage of the middle and upper class, then cities that de facto legalized cannabis would also have a higher percentage of the middle and upper class. Since cannabis businesses create jobs and bring tax revenues to city budgets, local governments have strong incentives to permit cannabis-related activities, especially when most citizens favor legalization. But imagine situations in which citizens voted for cannabis legalization, but governments forbade any cannabis businesses, or, on the contrary, citizens did not support the legalization, but governments adopted pro-cannabis policies. These examples demonstrate the dissociation between the public’s wishes and the government’s deeds and cast doubts on the legitimacy of cannabis in a given jurisdiction. As I discussed earlier, cannabis users and distributors bear a stigma that can potentially extend to other people and places.
Prosperous communities may decide to distance themselves from the possible harm of cannabis stigma and forbid any cannabis related activities . In contrast, for economically disadvantaged communities, financial benefits may outweigh the harm of stigma and reinforce the marginalization of places with already limited resources. I look at the adoption of pro-cannabis regulation as an example of morality policies, through which local governments draw a boundary between “pure” and “polluted”, “ordered” and “disordered”, “safe” and “dangerous.” To get a more nuanced picture of the legalization and normalization processes, it is important to understand the moral-economic rationale behind decision making at the city level. The question is not only whether cannabis is legal, but where, how, and to what degree it is legal. The goal of the quantitative analysis is to reveal variations in local regulation practices and define factors impeding or fostering the adoption of permissive cannabis policies at the city level. By exploring which cities are more likely to allow cannabis businesses, this research contributes to understanding the relationship between legitimacy and legality and helps determine the current status of cannabis in California. Moreover, the focus on city-level data provides an insight into how boundaries of normality vary across local contexts. Acting as moral entrepreneurs, local governments rely on principles of the politics of pollution and create a cognitive map of acceptable and non-acceptable places . Previous studies have highlighted the importance of religiosity, economic development, political competition, community composition, organizational perviousness, and historical legacies in explaining moral policy outcomes . This research takes a different path and sets out to clarify the relationship between changes in public attitudes and the adoption of morality policies . I posit that greater social and cultural accommodation of cannabis can explain permissive cannabis policies only to a certain degree. Socio-economic characteristics of communities and their racial composition also matter. Licensing agencies collect information at the individual level.For the current project, I aggregate the number of issued licenses at the city level, which excludes any personal identification from the dataset . The reasoning behind aggregating data at the city level is that according to the Medical and Adult Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act , cities have the full power and authority to enforce cannabis regulation and complete responsibility for any regulatory function relating to the licensees within the city limits.Local jurisdictions decide whether cannabis businesses will be legal on their territories or not, define which types of cannabis activity to allow , and establish regulatory schemes for activities involving growing or selling cannabis.Before applying for a cannabis license, an applicant has to obtain a permit from the city administration that would enable him/her to conduct commercial cannabis activity. The permit does not guarantee each applicant a cannabis license, but it gives him/her the green light to advance to the final stage and submit the application to a licensing agency.
The dependent variable has three different measures: the total number of cannabis licenses, the number of cultivation cannabis licenses , and the number of sale and distribution cannabis licenses . I suggest that factors explaining the permissiveness of local governments towards cannabis cultivation and cannabis distribution are not exactly the same. Cultivation primarily occurs in private spaces and thus is hidden from the public eye. On the contrary, retail is associated with public display: shop-windows, street signs, and advertising boards make cannabis dispensaries visible and accessible. I expect that the public display of cannabis will be more stigmatized than its private cultivation. The normalization of cannabis is a gradual process, and we cannot expect it to progress at the same pace in different localities. But we can assume that cities whose residents supported cannabis legalization will be more likely to pass pro-cannabis laws. As seen in Tab. 2, 72% of California cities supported the legalization of cannabis in 2016, but only 45% of them legalized cannabis-related economic activities within their borders. Moreover,of those cities whose residents did not support Proposition 64, 22% eventually permitted cannabis companies,what is need to grow marijuana despite the lack of public support . There is an obvious gap between people’s preferences and governments’ actions, which should be explained. Before turning to the description of other independent variables, I should address the issue of moral hypocrisy. Greater cultural acceptance of cannabis does not necessarily translate into moral acceptance of its sale and use. In particular, we do not know whether people who supported legalization are amenable to cannabis dispensaries in their neighborhoods—i.e., we cannot exclude the NIMBY phenomenon.The willingness to legalize cannabis may follow a pragmatic logic: decriminalizing cannabis generates tax revenues, creates jobs, and diminishes law enforcement costs. People may also support legalization because it gives an opportunity to begin repairing the damages caused by the criminal justice system in the past. Moreover, it may be perceived as a progressive move that fits general liberalizing trends, including same-sex marriage, abortion, pre-marital sex, drinking, gambling, and so on. And yet, people may be moral hypocrites: they may support the idea of cannabis legalization and act in discord with it by opposing the location of cannabis dispensaries in their backyards. The statistical analysis cannot account for these nuances and, thus, simplifications are inevitable.For the purposes of this analysis, “legitimacy” means tolerance of cannabis use rather than its total acceptance; it is what people are ready to declare publicly rather than act upon. Legitimacy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for legality.
What other factors can explain the responsiveness of local governments to morally controversial issues? Since only 38% of California cities allowed cannabis companies, the dependent variable has many zeros. To account for excessive zeros and overdispersion, I use a negative-binomial regression, which allows the variance to exceed the mean and is appropriate for analyses with a count outcome variable.87 Table 4 reports the estimated coefficients of the negative binomial regression models. Model 1 contains all cannabis licenses issued in California cities in 2018 and 2019. Model 2 tests hypotheses only for licenses issued by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Model 3 tests hypotheses only for licenses issued by the Bureau of Cannabis Control . The analysis demonstrates that cities whose residents supported cannabis legalization are more likely to permit cannabis-related activities within their borders . It is not surprising since, as I mentioned above, 45% of cities supporting cannabis legalization allow legal cannabis companies. The main question is: What other city properties are associated with the adoption of pro-cannabis legislation? Opinion polls show that the middle- and upper-class representatives, young adults, and non-Hispanic citizens support cannabis legalization at higher rates than other social groups. I ran a separate model regressing the percent of support for Proposition 64 on the index of economic prosperity, percent of people aged 20 to 29, and percent of the Hispanic population . The results confirm that the support of cannabis legalization is associated with a higher index of economic prosperity, a larger percentage of young adults, and a lower percentage of the Hispanic population. This association is significant at the 0.01 level. However, as we see in Table 4, cities that eventually allowed legal cannabis companies, on the contrary, are more likely have a lower index of economic prosperity , a lower percentage of young population , and a higher percentage of the Hispanic population . The disparity between the demand and supply offers an intriguing puzzle. Economically prosperous cities, on average, express higher support of cannabis legalization, but it does not mean that they are more likely to permit legal cannabis companies within their borders. Moreover, there are significant differences between licenses issued for sale and cultivation. Cultivation licenses are more likely to be issued in cities with a lower percentage of the young population, which can be explained by the fact that these are mostly rural remote areas, and young adults live in more urbanized places. Sale licenses are associated with three other factors: a higher percentage of the Hispanic population, a lower city’s fiscal score, and higher violent crime rates. There is substantial evidence in the findings that socio-spatial stigmatization of cannabis persists despite its legalization.