No abstract

As governments worldwide justify the transformation of marijuana governance from one police power (law enforcement) to others (e.g. public health, zoning), the place of marijuana in lawful society is transforming rapidly. No venue in California is more central to this than land use regulatory bodies, which decide how marijuana rights, practices, and relations become territorial. Land use powers, as a declaration of the state’s police power, require a definitional rendering of “community.” This article analyzes an episode of outdoor marijuana cultivation policymaking and the struggles over the definition of community in a conservative exurban California county. From debates on fences, property line setbacks, rental terms, and nuisance complaints to racial and economic anxieties and the roaming stigma of crime, marijuana advocates confronted a powerful logic of private property and the moral-aesthetic propriety it implies. Despite the subordination of advocates’ claims to the terms of private property, outlaw communities sustained their own forms of territorial governance, informal regulatory and enforcement powers, and understandings of community. This episode, which illuminates territorial production across illegal/legal lines, has implications for understandings of liberal rule of law, political possibility, and the practice of citizenship.

Despite its ongoing federal illegality, marijuana production has become a licit, or socially accepted, feature of northern California’s real estate market. As such, marijuana is a key component of land values and the laundering of “illegal” wealth into legitimate circulation. By following land transaction practices, relations, and instruments, this article shows how formally equal property transactions become substantively unequal in light of the “il/legal” dynamics of marijuana land use. As marijuana becomes licit, prohibitionist policies have enabled the capture of ground rent by landed interests from the marijuana industry at a time when the price of marijuana is declining (in part due to its increasing licitness). The resulting “drug war rentier nexus,” a state–land–finance complex, is becoming a key, if obscured, component within marijuana’s contemporary political economy.

No abstract