Cannabis Use in an English Community

Abstract

Cannabis occupies an ambiguous social, cultural, economic, and legal position, meaning that the way communities construct, interact with, and interpret drug markets is a complicated and uncertain process. This article seeks to explain these ambiguities by investigating the place of cannabis use in a UK borough, drawing on qualitative empirical data collated from a sample (N ¼ 68) of practitioners, local residents, cannabis users, and their families. In doing so, the article employs the concept of liminality (whereby individuals and spaces occupy a position at both ends of a threshold) to explore how community behaviors and norms relate to issues of space, harm, and drug policy. The article contextualizes the position of cannabis use within the fieldwork site, exploring a series of competing contradictions that divided participants between the rhetoric and reality of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition suggests cannabis use to be dangerous, which prompted concern. However, the lived reality of prohibition for residents sat in stark juxtaposition: The drug was used commonly and publicly, was effectively decriminalized, and its use (reluctantly) accommodated. This malaise placed residents within what is described here as the liminality of drug prohibition, in which notions of the licit and illicit became blurred and whereby the illegality of cannabis augmented anxieties yet simultaneously proved a barrier to addressing them. In conclusion, the current study provides further evidence of prohibitionist drug policy proliferating rather than mitigating drug-related harms.

Parenting through the lenses of risk and othering: Constructions of parental cannabis use in child protection court proceedings

“…Cannabis is currently the most used illicit psychoactive substance in the world (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2019). Although its legal status and social legitimacy are rapidly changing, with many countries allowing medical use, some permitting recreational use and others giving low priority to policing it (Seddon & Floodgate, 2020), cannabis continues to occupy an ambiguous sociocultural and legal position, and its normalization is both relative and differentiated in relation to different socio‐political contexts and social groups (Taylor et al, 2018).…”