Dr. Corva presenting at the Alliance May 12, 2016, at the Swedish Cultural Center, Seattle, WA.
by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director
Last Thursday, Dr. Corva gave CASP’s first public presentation of our book-in-progress, “Washington State Legalization Phase I: An Ethnographic Report from the Perspective of Medical Transitioners.” We will be rolling out pieces of it on this blog through August, and this post introduces the book by explaining up front why we focus on stories of Medical Transition.
The unique value of the book project is its focus on the experiences of Medical Cannabis Transitioners, people and businesses that established livelihood identities as Medical Cannabis stakeholders before deciding to become Legal Cannabis stakeholders. For most, this means becoming a business licensed under the I 502 system. We have conducted 18 in-depth interviews ranging from one to seven hours long, since February. These interviews were transcribed, coded, and we are now in the process of writing four chapters. I’ll talk about those in a moment.
The choice to focus on Medical Transitioners is a calculated one. Here is a short list of reasons, in no particular order, which when put together make a powerful argument for the relevance and salience of this approach.
- Our interest in cannabis legalization is continuous with our interest in the historical arc of cannabis policy reform. Law and Policy reforms have built on one another over time, and formal legalization is but the next step in a process whose social dynamics require past progress. No single entity or moment can claim singular responsibility for legalization: it’s the outcome of a social movement, not a campaign that breaks radically with the past. Transitioner stories make this abundantly clear.
- Our interest in successful transitioners excludes both non-transitioners and new market actors. These two groups deserve careful study and research, but given the infancy of our State Legal Cannabis policy experiment we find that official efforts (such as the annual WSIPP report) focus almost exclusively on I 502 as a New Market/Policy; and that State actors are indifferent-to-hostile to non-transitioner stakeholders. Transitioner stories help us identify what kinds of knowledge are or can be transitioned into the new system.
- Transition knowledge comes from a fundamentally different cultural reality than New Market and Policy knowledge. Transitioner culture is post-prohibition in that it proceeds from civil disobedience to Federal Prohibition, from medical and underground cannabis values in which the plant is not, fundamentally, a threat to society. New Market and Policy culture remains tied to the “social threat” meaning of cannabis in a lot of ways, but chiefly through compliance with the Federal Cole Memo.
- There is a fundamentally practical side to examining Transitioner knowledge, since these are the people have far more experience with the plant, its markets, its cultural identities, and even the practice of regulatory compliance with local and State officials than New Market actors. They are the ones who have worked with policymakers and the public to get open as licensed businesses in the absence of central licensing law and policy. They have developed relationships with their communities, police, fire inspectors, and City and County officials, in a way that New Market actors have not. They have developed an organic local legitimacy necessary for sustainable businesses, and translated that legitimacy to the state by becoming licensed I 502 businesses.
- The system needs them, therefore — needs that experience and knowledge that comes from creating social trust in the absence of State endorsement. It’s clear that State endorsement doesn’t lead to social trust, necessarily, as evidenced by the Bans and Moratoria that make our State Policy experiment a rather uneven one, geographically. The knowledge about he plant is vital, too, as evidenced by SB 5052’s intention to “protect” medical access through the I 502 system past July 1. The recreational system was literally not allowed to make any kind of claims about cannabis as medicine for Phase I, and desperately needs stakeholders with experience and knowledge of cannabis as medicine to comply with SB 5052’s mandate.
- Transitioners have a nuanced critique of our State Policy experiment that is necessary for a robust understanding of not just the outcomes of our State Policy experiment, but the process of designing it. Annual WSIPP reports will provide fantastic information on the results of the experiment, but they’ll never provide a productive and transparent critique of its design and administration. “Productive critique” here does not mean criticism, it means analysis of the power relationships that steer the ship, to mix metaphors, in the direction it says it wants to go: away from prohibition. Transitioners aren’t hamstrung by prohibition culture, so they don’t have to discipline what they say to reflect the Cole Memo’s prohibition values.
- Finally, CASP as an organization has spent most of its research efforts on Medical Cannabis organizers and organization. Thus, this ethnography is the outcome of three years in the field for Dr. Corva and Dr. Sexton, not just 18 processed ethnographic interviews. The legitimacy of the interviews as a basis for research reports rests on this fieldwork “embeddedness”: we knew what questions to ask because we were there and often part of it. There is a “participant-observation” aspect to this ethnography, which in the social sciences comes with its strengths and weaknesses. We will address those at length in the methodology section of the book.
This is the first in what should be a summer-long release of different parts of the book as we fill out the chapters from the interview evidence collected. We hope to have a full draft done by August 1, 2016. Our next post will focus on the structure and process of the book, which is more the production of a collaborative research network than any single author. For now, let’s acknowledge authoring collaborators — later we will acknowledge our interview subjects themselves. Our interns are Hillary Bernhardt and Paul Jamison; Dr. Michelle Sexton and Brad Douglass of the Wercshop are primary contributors to the Lab chapter so far, but Dr. Jim MacRae will be getting his crack at it once Brad sends us his comments; Dr. MacRae is also a substantive contributor to the Producer/Processor chapter. And of course Dr. Corva is cat-herder in chief of the project.