The three betrayals of the medical cannabis growing activist: From multiple victimhood to reconstruction, redemption and activism

Abstract

While cannabis has been widely used in the UK for over 50 years, it is only in recent decades that domestic cultivation has become established. Public concern, media reporting and policing policy has emphasised the role of profit motivated criminal organisations often working on a large scale and with coerced labour. However, increasingly, another population are growing for medical reasons, to help themselves and others treat or manage difficult, poorly understood, or incurable conditions. Our study sought to further understand the motives, techniques and interactions of cannabis cultivators through interviews with 48 growers and supplementary ethnographic work. As well as those motivated to grow for personal use, social and commercial supply purposes we identified a cohort growing to provide themselves and others with cannabis used for therapeutic purposes. This paper draws primarily on interviews with a sub-group of sixteen medically-motivated growers who were not only involved in treatment, but also embraced the label "activist". Rather than develop techniques of deception they were organising to effect a change in legislation. Rejecting the image of criminal perpetrators, they presented themselves as victims of unjust government policy, an indifferent medical establishment, and brutal and immoral criminal markets. Through cultivation, association, self-healing and apomedication, they have found voice and are shifting the debate over the status of growers and of cannabis itself. The ambiguity of their position as both producers and patients challenges the assumptions underlying legal distinctions between suppliers and users, with potentially profound implications for policy.

Using the pharmacy retail model to examine perceptions and biases of a UK population sample towards regulation of specific psychoactive drugs

“…Currently, most cannabis users in the UK buy cannabis from unregulated black market vendors. Unlike pharmacists (Dessing, 2000), 'drug dealers' do not need to follow an ethical code of conduct (Fast et al, 2017;Klein and Potter, 2018) and have no obligation to encourage moderated usage or to sell strains more suitable for therapeutic applications (Bhattacharyya et al, 2018;Sartim et al, 2018;Schubart et al, 2011;Wall et al, 2019). Most black market vendors in the UK cannot offer a broad variety of strains and do not have medical training or knowledge of what they are selling and how it could positively and negatively impact the health of the consumer (Hurley, 2018).…”

Can the subaltern heal? Medical marijuana in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Clinicians in different specialities are more or less willing to prescribe it, for example, palliative care physicians are more open to prescribing a medication that is potentially addictive, drawing on their own observations and patient testimonials rather than relying on the science (Zolotov et al, 2018). In the subaltern realm, efforts to standardise potencies and experiment with different cannabis varieties occurs, drawing on the science rhetoric of statist medicine (Klein and Potter, 2018).…”

“…The debates around medical marijuana may be unique as part of its subaltern positioning is a result of the illegal status of the plant as a drug of abuse. Information exchanges occur in informal ways, through such mechanisms as cannabis clubs (Klein & Potter, 2018). But where claims about therapeutic outcomes are proscribed by statist medicine there are likely to be other forms of subaltern therapeutics.…”

Introduction: cultivation, medication, activism and cannabis policy

“…They will also have to reconcile dramatically different approaches to realising the aspired cannabis economy. On the one hand there is the sharing, not for profit model exemplified by the best examples of the CSCs, or the apomedication networks (Klein and Potter, 2018) of cannabis healers that are becoming alternative forms of healthcare provision. Bypassing markets and medical establishments, these shifts towards autarchy and the sharing economy somehow reconnects cannabis with the counter-cultural protests of the 1960s.…”