The Social Construction of Cannabis in Social Work

Abstract

The social construction of cannabis has important implications for policy, research, practice, and education in social work. The objective of this article is to chart the construction of cannabis in articles published in social work journals across the past half century. The author critically reviews empirical articles with references to cannabis published in 15 key social work journals between 1970 and 2018. Systematic searches resulted in a combined set of 510 articles, of which 244 matched the inclusion criteria for this study. A content and thematic analysis of the corpus identified the dominant construction of cannabis in social work research literature as a harmful substance undifferentiated from other drugs. This construction was challenged by a minority of the articles in three ways: (1) by differentiating between use and abuse and between cannabis as a soft drug and a hard drug; (2) by highlighting social inequality as an important component of any consideration of social work policy and practice with regard to cannabis use; and (3) by considering the possible positive effects of cannabis use. This article calls for a revision of the construction of cannabis use in social work.

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

“…Based on the premise that both cannabis use and parenting are not merely descriptive terms, but also socially constructed behaviours grounded in political and moral considerations (Lavie‐Ajayi, 2022), we took a critical constructivist approach (Kincheloe, 2005) that aspired to reveal how discourse and interpretation shape the construction of social realities (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). Thus, we aimed to problematize and elucidate the social and political processes through which meanings are attributed to cannabis use and the consequences of particular meanings for children and families in child protection proceedings.…”

“…In the context of child protection, parental cannabis use has scarcely been studied as a phenomenon distinct from substance use in general, and has mainly been explored at the individual treatment level without attention to its social and political contexts. In a recent systematic review of references to cannabis in social work scholarship, Lavie-Ajayi (2022) found that between 1970 and 2018, the main body of social work literature presented it "without a discussion of the substance itself, with little or no differentiation between cannabis and other drugs, and as characteristic of problematic populations or behaviours". Moreover, little is known about the meanings attributed to cannabis use in child protection processes and family court proceedings.…”