To a great extent, the press and television adopted the presidential definition of drugs: although some journalists and activists were critical of the government’s solution to the drug problem, they did not question the use of the “war” metaphor and thereby reinforced the existing perspective . Businesses, public organizations, and ordinary citizens have embraced the rhetoric of US presidents and mass media, holding urban ethnic minorities responsible for the creation of the drug problem and accountable for its resolution . The result of these rhetorical battles was more generous funding of law enforcement agencies and the growth of the prison population. Law enforcement agencies’ budgets increased.Nowadays, cannabis use for recreational and medical purposes is becoming more mainstream. According to Gallup, support for legalizing cannabis grew from 12% in 1970 to 68% in 2020.34 As Simon ironically comments, “We will perhaps have arrived at the ‘tipping point’ when baby boomers are more anxious about access to medical marijuana for their chemotherapy than if their kids are lighting up after school” . Even though cannabis has been to a great extent legitimate in the eyes of large parts of the population, the dynamics of governing through crime has not changed. While state cannabis laws gradually become more permissive, federal law enforcement remains punitive. According to FBI statistics, in 2017, cannabis was still responsible for over 40% of all drug arrests. The racial consequences also remained despite the advance of legalization: African Americans are more likely to be arrested for driving under the influence of cannabis, possession of cannabis by youths, and public consumption of cannabis indoor grow system. What can we take from the “told” history of cannabis? As I show above, the sociological and sociolegal literature presents the criminalization of cannabis as a moral issue.
Many studies provide evidence that the war on cannabis was a moral crusade that undermined the medical professionals, discredited scientific research, and spread fears among the population. In this constructivist approach to the drug problem, anti-cannabis rhetoric functions as a currency in political campaigns: the purpose of the war on cannabis was not to counter actual drug crime or drug abuse but to respond to white middle-class anxiety towards immigrants, minorities of color, or political activists. By performing a symbolic—rather than instrumental—role , anti-cannabis legislation drew a line between “normal” and “pathological” substances and between deserving and undeserving citizens. Sociology of deviance defines several essential characteristics of morality policies.First, moral laws are centered around controversial questions on which it is difficult to reach a compromise. These are a product of culture wars upon which individuals project their ideals of good life . Since different groups have opposing and even mutually exclusive concepts of virtue, moral issues tend to recur now and then and rarely come to an ultimate resolution. Second, moral laws seek to establish a set of values that dominate at their present time. According to James Hunter, laws are not just about what we can and cannot do; laws “contain a moral story that proclaims the ideals and principles of the people who live by them” . Through lawmaking, societies create “a particular nomos, a normative universe that draws distinctions, discriminates, judges, excludes and includes” . Third, passing moral laws involves the work of “moral entrepreneurs,” the rule creators and rule enforcers who invest their efforts in constructing a new meaning of goodness . Moral crusaders believe that what they do is good for others and that by improving morality, they help people live a better life . Moral entrepreneurs can have differing agendas—prohibitionist, abolitionist, humanitarian, traditionalist, liberal, etc.—but their ultimate goal is to change the existing rule. Fourth, morality policies are often difficult to enforce because the policy’s objective is symbolic and offers no clear operationalization . The application of moral laws does not affect actual behavior—for example, it does not decrease drug consumption rates—but instead shies it away from public display, encouraging the development of the black market.36
We tend to think about moral politics as banning certain activities rather than allowing them. This research, on the contrary, focuses on the legalization of cannabis as an example of permissive morality regulation. The moral dilemma that characterizes the current cannabis debate can be described as “social expectations vs. core individual rights.” As the history of cannabis criminalization shows, prohibition stood as a symbol of the general system of values with which the conservative white majority was identified. The Protestant ethics measured men’s moral worthiness in terms of productivity: any activity distracting an individual from being productive is a waste of time. Using cannabis for pleasure is immoral not only because it can affect an individual’s physical well-being but also because it represents a particular lifestyle and attitude toward work and social responsibilities. In turn, the legalization rhetoric centers on the discussion over the limits of state intervention in the private behavior of citizens.The US Constitution guarantees the right to privacy and non-interference by the state in personal matters, and the California Constitution lists a right to privacy among the inalienable rights .The history of cannabis criminalization shows that ideas and moral visions have been a decisive factor in the adoption of anti-cannabis legislation. Currently, California is in a transition period when cannabis use is slowly getting normalized in public perception but continues to be illegal and pathological from the federal government’s perspective.Analyzing the context of the war on drugs is important for understanding the departure point of this ideational change. However, as I argue in the next section, in order to apprehend today’s status of cannabis, we should turn away from the macro-level explanations and shift the attention to local actors and on-the-ground processes. The crime control paradigm is preponderant in the socio-legal literature on drugs.
The social history of cannabis in the US is often recorded as a top-down, event-based analysis, which focuses on capstone legislations, elite actors, and political intentions. From this perspective, the war on drugs results from the deliberate actions of the state officials and the mass media against marginalized groups. Although these views are extremely valuable for understanding the deep historical forces of mass incarceration, the focus on top-down processes may sometimes overshadow other possible interpretations of the drug problem. By devoting much attention to the public debates over the dangers of cannabis, these studies tell us a great deal about political agendas but relatively little about the role of medical professionals, pharmacists, manufacturers, associations, businesses, schools, families, local authorities, cannabis users and distributors in defining cannabis. Drugs are not only a criminal justice issue but also a societal problem, a medical problem, a moral problem, a market problem, and so on. As Joseph Spillane points out, much of the action happens “on the street, in the daily interactions among sellers, users, families, doctors, police, and jailers” . As I argue further, the prevailing orthodoxy often fails to understand criminalization as a complex dynamic process with several levels of action and thus casts aside many essential questions. One voice that is consistently missing in the constructivist approach to the drug problem is the voice of drug addicts and their immediate environments. As Michael Fortner argues, the existing perspectives on the war of crime tend to minimize the agency of African Americans who are typically portrayed as victims of the power of racial order and reactionary Republican politics. The New Jim Crow’s thesis focuses on white power and black powerlessness, which renders black politics invisible and obscures the causes of mass incarceration . According to Fortner, many scholars treat actual crime as fiction rather than lived experience. To cover the theoretical gaps, he investigates the role of the “black silent majority” in adopting punitive legislation, namely the Rockefeller drug laws in New York City in 1973. His study provides several critical analytical implications. First, we cannot study the drug problem out of context without exploring how local institutions and local processes influenced the framing of public concerns and policy responses . Second, aggregated statistics give little information about attitudes to crime and drugs. As Fortner demonstrates, white districts in New York City experienced significantly lower violent crime rates, drug addiction, and deaths due to drugs than black areas. The devastating effect of the drug and crime problem on black communities raised great concerns among the black population and led to higher support of anti-drug and anti-crime policies.
Evidence from California reveals similar patterns: in the 1970s, whites in Los Angeles were more concerned with pollution and noise than crime, while black citizens listed better crime control as the number one issue . This picture contradicts the popular notion in socio-legal studies that whites supported punitive policies more than blacks. By focusing on white victimization and black criminalization, researchers neglected the activism of the urban black middle class, which created incentives for local politicians to respond to demands for greater punitive policies .James Forman advances a similar argument showing that working- and middle-class black communities did not support the decriminalization of cannabis. The history of cannabis is often presented as a part of the war on drugs. However, as Forman righty notices, the anti-drug campaign aimed at heavier drugs. Nixon’s declaration of drugs as the nation’s largest enemy coincided with the first attempts to decriminalize cannabis at the state level by making possession of small amounts of cannabis a civil fraction rather than a criminal offense. The widespread knowledge about the minimal risks of cannabis use boosted decriminalization movements in many states. Since the pro-cannabis movements’ leaders were overwhelmingly white, cannabis equipment decriminalization was framed as a question of civil liberties and individual autonomy rather than racial justice. In Washington, D.C., the black community took cannabis decriminalization with skepticism as a policy that protects young whites and oppresses young blacks. White teenagers could smoke cannabis without jeopardizing their future because their middle-class cocoon could shield them from the consequences of drug use. But, poor black teenagers had much less room for error because they would risk graduating from school or finding a job . In other words, to the African American communities, the drug problem was not just a hypothetical threat. The 1960s the heroin epidemics had instilled a real sensibility for the drug problem and taught the members of black communities that addiction could destroy families, schools, and entire neighborhoods. Another particularity of the crime control perspective is the reliance on law and legislation as a sole historical marker of change . The “told” history of cannabis prohibition is often plotted as a sequence of events leadings from one capstone legislation to another. Such an approach overemphasizes the role of formal laws in triggering social and institutional change. In reality, legislation itself does not cause change; its scope, significance, and relevance are determined in the process of interpretation and further implementation. To understand when, where, and how change happens and what role the law plays in the process, we need to look at local phenomena and on-the-ground practices. The event-based perspective fails to recognize that the passage of legislation is the continuation of a process that begins before and lasts after its adoption . The legal prohibition of cannabis is not merely a political project organized by a cohesive group of elite actors but a multilevel, complex, and dynamic social process. Formal legislations affirm rather than cause social and cultural changes, especially when the primary function of law is symbolic. For example, the legalization of the medical use of cannabis in California in 1996 did not affect cannabis arrest rates. The number of arrests for cannabis possession was steadily growing until 2010 and decreased five-fold in one year after the passage of SB-1449, which reclassified the possession of small amounts of cannabis as a misdemeanor . Thus, the legalization of medical cannabis symbolized the public affirmation of new social norms and ideals, but it did not change law enforcement practices. The SB-1449, on the contrary, affected people’s behavior in a more direct and instrumental manner, but its adoption would not be thinkable without the preceding cultural shift. On Fig. 1, the legalization of the medical use of cannabis in California would be a constructed event, while the adoption of the SB-1449 would be on the level of observable occurrences that followed the event.