Permitting Marginality: An Intimate Ethnography of Marijuana Legalization

• In Event: 1567 - Section on Sociology of Law Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 2: Micro Perspectives

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed a cascading adoption of marijuana decriminalization and legalization measures on the state level. Such dramatic changes have spurred several debates, including how to implement these laws in light of sustained federal criminalization as well as how to attenuate any negative public health effects from greater marijuana availability. However, less academic attention has been paid to how legalization will come to have implications for those who have been most affected by marijuana’s criminalization, i.e. those directly involved in the illicit marijuana market and the broader communities in which they are embedded. Emerging evidence of the disproportionate benefit to Whites compared to non-Whites in the legal market as well as the scholarship on the collateral consequences of the “War on Drugs” era of public policy suggest that legalization should profoundly matter for these groups. This dissertation proposes to examine how legalization will impinge upon—and perhaps even reconstitute—the material and cultural lives of some who have been most affected by marijuana’s criminalization. Using an ethnographic method, I propose to conduct participant observations and longitudinal, in-depth interviews with Asian-American gang members who have been involved in the cultivation and sale of marijuana for a decade in California as well as with those within their wider social support networks. As California currently navigates the legalization process, I take advantage of this period to observe how the move from criminalization to legalization signals a shift in the substantive relevance of both the law and the illicit market that it underwrites in the everyday lives of my subjects. The project is specifically concerned with how dimensions of subject formation (i.e. race, nation, gender, class, sexuality, etc.) co-articulate with each other bounded between the dual arms of economic and carceral institutions.

Author

• Christina Hughes, University of Washington