Whiteness, Security, and Control in North American Cannabis

• In Event: Controlling Environments, Growing Plants - II

Abstract

This paper will draw on fieldwork with Canadian and American marijuana growers to be conducted during the spring and summer of 2019. I will explore the development and implementation of newly legal cannabis economies in North America by interrogating the ways in which they draw upon scientific, biopolitical, and criminal justice logics in order to regulate and control forms of growing environments and practices, ownership structures, and industry participation. In turn, I will analyze the developing legal cannabis economy in relation to theories of whiteness, feminist STS, and settler colonialism to demonstrate how legal cannabis markets are informed by and continue to reinforce the racial and colonial violence historically at the center of drug prohibition and state governance, reaching back hundreds of years. I take particular interest in the securitization, medicalization, and seemingly militarized nature of the Canadian marijuana economy in order to critique the broader settler colonial governance of Canada and its privileging of 'science' in the creation of 'pure', 'safe', and 'responsible' cannabis growing environments and plant products. I conclude by highlighting alternative modes of cannabis economies/ecologies that do not rely on capitalist profit maximization such as worker owned co-operatives and collaborative regional growing communities.

Author

• Alex Rewegan, MIT