The Dangers of Health and Safety: Marijuana Legalization as Frontier Capitalism

Abstract

In this article I explore how the legalization of marijuana in North America involves the racialized class appropriation of diverse material, social and cultural capitals borne of black-market marijuana production and distribution. This process is facilitated by a conceptual dichotomy that grants the public either a U.S.-driven “war on drugs” or a state-organized corporate marijuana sector that favors highly capitalized interests, omitting the option of simple decriminalization. I study how this false dichotomy is normalized by politicians, entrepreneurs, and lay consumers by way of two interrelated strategies: The traditional vendor is constructed as “violent” whereas the legal one is “safe,” and the legalized marijuana product of “safe” corporate oligarchs is also made “safe” by its discursive and institutional association with medicine, purity, and “healing,” whereas the product of traditional suppliers remains “polluted” and “dangerous.” In the final analysis, we remember that health itself is a political, class-making device, brought to inaugurate class rights, responsibilities, and the respectability of some at the expense of others. Synthesizing ethnographic analysis, historical inquiry, political economic theories of capitalist appropriation, social science literatures on public health, and medical anthropology, this article suggests that persons enthusiastic for legalization confuse consumer desire with a commitment to social justice when they suggest that state-controlled legalized marijuana, in the context of neoliberal capitalism, represents an anti-imperialist social good. Social scientists are invited to remain vigilant about their potential complicity in the racialized class-making politics of public health in its intersection with shifting marijuana laws.

The Idea of Sex Work

“…The news media has already reported on the challenges faced by small minority business owners in the face of decriminalizing recreational marijuana in California and New York. 144 Decriminalization of the sex industry in Australia's New South Wales offers a similar cautionary tale. 145 Corporate capitalism-in the form of the adult entertainment industry or internet websites-is happy to fill the void when older structures of domination are eliminated.…”