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, drying cannabis 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. 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 . After doing a thorough review of the social movement literature, I was able to build a theoretical vocabulary to explain this transition as a shifting of fields, from the political field to the commercial field. By working in the hybrid field of medical cannabis, I experienced the quotidian shifts in discourse and practice that facilitate the transition between these two fields of practice. The unique perspective I gained as an employee in a medical cannabis dispensary also gave me a front row seat to the framing strategies that people use at an active site, or modality, of drug policy reform. I was able to learn and practice the shift in diction that my fellow employees and I used to accomplish the discursive shift of changing a previously illicit substance into a legitimate or licit substance . On a practical level, by working at a dispensary I was able to meet other activists, medical cannabis patients, and attend numerous drug policy events as a volunteer. My status as an employee gave me entrée into the world of drug policy reform and also made my research feasible with minimal outside funding. I used participant observation to explore the sites where the drug policy movement constitutes itself. This element of the study looked at two locations where participants in this movement most often interact with one another face-to-face, festivals and conferences.
As noted by social movement scholars, face-to-face interactions are necessary to supplement the technologically based networking of participants through the Internet and other communication technologies. In addition to providing demographic data about attendees, the public speakers, panel discussions and presentations at these events offered rich qualitative data about the movement. I used this data to analyze how drug policy reformers frame their actions and to discover the key concerns of movement actors. I also used these events as convenient places to gather literature from various organizations. In addition to attending hemp fests, and conferences hosted by organizations, I attended several types of meetings during the course of my research project. I attended monthly and annual meetings of organizations, city council meetings, and city medical marijuana task force or commission meetings. These various meetings proved to be excellent sites for gathering qualitative data on how organizations and city governments work to regulate the emergent phenomenon of medical cannabis. To illuminate how organizations change drug policy, curing cannabis how various organizations work together, and the biographical dimensions of drug policy activism, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with the members of several different drug policy reform organizations. I employed a snowball sampling technique to reach the leaders and members of drug policy organizations. I sought out key figures in the medical cannabis movement to gain access to their unique knowledge of the movement’s history, policy outcomes , collaborating with other organizations and elite benefactors, and interactions with government officials. My interviews with key figures helped me to answer my research questions about the political opportunity structures that allow for novel drug policies. I also asked my interview subjects about their biographies, how they became involved in activism and what led to changes in their political consciousness. Occasionally, participants in the drug policy reform movement engage in public protest and acts of civil disobedience to decry existing drug policy and institute new policy arrangements. I attended and participated in a medical cannabis protest in November 2011. The events that precipitated the protest, the number and types of people in attendance and the slogans, speeches, and chants that the protesters used provided rich data for examining how medical marijuana is both a social movement and an industry. Episodes of civil disobedience also provide unique sites to analyze the interaction between the state and the drug policy reform movement. Under what circumstances do activists engage in civil disobedience? What metaphors, slogans and symbols do protestors deploy? What unites the diverse organizations, funders and participants of the drug policy reform movement is a belief that prohibition as an overarching approach to dealing with illicit drug use creates many problems for individuals and society.
Although not all organizations and individuals in the movement agree that prohibition should be rolled back in its entirety, all the organizations in the movement find at least some aspects of prohibition to create more problems than it solves. In the 1970s, organizations sought to decriminalize the adult use of cannabis because they viewed its prohibition as an affront to individual liberties, and because it relegated a whole class of otherwise law-abiding individuals to criminal status . In the 1980s, the harm reduction movement began as a public health based response to the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C among injection drug users. Eventually harm reduction blossomed into a philosophy undergirding an alternative approach to drug problems . It was not until the mid 1980s that a wholly anti-prohibitionist branch of the movement coalesced around the issues of racial injustice and the prison boom, human rights and instability in drug producing countries , and a reintegration of earlier branches of the movement . All three branches of the movement actively challenge the discourse of drug prohibition, in addition to specific policies sustained by the “drug control industrial complex” . At an abstract level, the various organizations and participants of the drug policy reform movement are engaging in a collective argument with supporters of drug prohibition. Billig uses a discursive approach to the conduct of social movements. In the tradition of social psychology, he emphasizes the importance of language for movements. “Social movements can be seen as a conducting arguments against prevailing common sense” . This makes the rhetorical tasks of social movements challenging because most attempts at persuasive discourse appeal to common sense. Essentially the movement argues “prohibition creates more problems than it solves.” As seen with the Occupy movement that began in New York City’s Wall Street district in September 2011, one of the most powerful effects a movement can have is on changing the national discussion or debate. While sociologists and economists have decried income stratification, income inequality and the ever shrinking middle class in the U.S. for decades, the Occupy movement was able to shatter the commonly held and widely disseminated myth that the U.S. is overwhelmingly a middle class society typified by a high degree of mobility. Although politicians and journalists have decried the central tactic of the Occupy movement, by physically occupying public space the movement was able to change the public debate much more quickly than movements that rely primarily on social movement organizations to make things happen. What makes the argument particularly difficult for the movement to win is an imbalance in access to what I have termed the means of representation. Until the 1990s, supporters of prohibition have had privileged access to the means of representation. As I show in chapter two, the drug policy reform movement is using the Internet to address this disparity with increasing success. In addition to challenging the discourse of prohibition on the Internet and increasingly in the mainstream news media, the drug policy reform movement converges at conferences and hemp rallies to vocalize, experience, and broadcast its challenge to the discourse of drug prohibition. The movement challenges both the policies enforced in the name of prohibition and on a more abstract level, representations of drug users and drug use that prohibitionist discourses seek to portray. By challenging policies and representations that are part and parcel of those policies, the movement collapses a conceptual division that New Social Movements theorists including Alberto Melucci and Manuel Castells seek to draw, the idea that movements are about cultural stakes and not legal or political stakes. I consider the question of whether the drug policy reform movement seeks political or cultural change during my research, and will revisit this dichotomy in later chapters. At the outset, I wish to make it known that I am not only an academic observer of drug policy reform, but I am also an active participant. My position as both an advocate for and observer of drug policy reform presents a difficult balancing act. While I strive to objectively represent and analyze the drug policy reform movement, I wholeheartedly support the basic argument of drug policy reform; prohibition is an ineffective way to deal with drug use and it creates more harmful consequences than it addresses.