Category: Local

“Re-imagining Cooperative Cannabis” Phase II Research Results

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The Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP) is excited to present the second phase of our first collaboration with a mission-specific independent research project, “Re-imagining Cooperative Cannabis.” The study is part of Principal Investigator Nicole Riggs’ LiT Project research agenda to develop case studies and community-based education to define and give voice to legacy cannabis cultivation stakeholders in the North Coast of California, starting in Humboldt County where she and Cara Cordoni, her principal Cooperation Humboldt collaborator, live and work. They were joined by graduate student Emma Karnes of the University of Virginia, which provided Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for the work.

The significance of the work

This research identifies and represents cannabis farming as a continuous way of life in rural Northern California, one for whom legalization poses particular challenges. For them, cannabis represents a cultural economy: a cash crop that has produced communitarian values and practices drawn from and drawn into the places where they live and, for now, remain. 

They are part of the fabric of their communities, not extractivist “Big Weed” owners for whom farming is only valuable to generate wealth for distant stakeholders, wealthy investors, and corporate executives.

And they are part of the fabric of their local communities because of the particular values they hold in common, social and environmental stewardship. They are a distinct “legacy” community within the wider regulated and unregulated cannabis community, found across the state and in different parts of the supply chain.

Future community-based, community-defining research should extend to urban communities and jurisdictions. Rural and urban community stakeholders face similar structural barriers to entry and frustrations with systemic inequity in legal cannabis. 

The Department of Cannabis Control would do well to incentivize cannabis market participation for the communities that value the plant for how it helps them stay in place and support their communities, more than just a source of revenue or profit for corporate shareholders and already-wealthy, wildly overcompensated CEOs.

More about the work

The work was a collaboration between Cooperation Humboldt and CASP and started with the main goal of learning from the former’s efforts to make education about collaborative business practices available to cannabis cultivators on the North Coast.

This case study was carried out in two stages, survey and interviews, by Nicole Riggs and her research assistants, Cara Cordoni (Cooperation Humboldt) and Emma Karnes (University of Virginia graduate student). Dr. Tony Silvaggio, CASP Senior Affiliate Researcher, contributed his substantive expertise in research design and methodology at both phases. All work was provided on a volunteer basis (no one was paid for it). CASP did pay for access to Atlas.ti software to help with the analysis and coding, which cost less than $200.

The results of the pilot survey of more than 80 respondents were released in September 2021. The purpose of the survey was not simply to gather information and present data, but to “build empathy and understand the needs, challenges and hopes  of the users” (1).  Like all good, community-based research, it was a methodology for engaging and understanding people on their own terms, and as such was an act of community-building, not just an exercise in representing data. 

Without it, the second in-depth interview phase of 28 out of 81 survey respondents would not have been possible. This stage of community-engaged research involved semi-structured interviews, coding, and analysis of the data. The purpose was to give “voice to the feelings, concerns and visions of the producers themselves (3)”

This research is uniquely relevant to policymakers and institutional research funders in several ways, but I want to lead with its relevance to the communities to which it gives voice. 

The act of doing and publishing this research makes particular kinds of stakeholders visible as living, breathing community members whose hopes and dreams of a future that is connected to their past are of primary importance. Cannabis legalization should be about its people, not just the plant.

Cannabis legalization tends to aggregate people into data: multi-state operators feeding enormous CEO compensation while their companies lose money until their competitors go out of business are treated more or less the same as livelihood owner-operators in the policy imagination of aggregate cultivation supply. 

We hope that this groundbreaking work can help inform cannabis policy design and implementation and provide a fertile ground for future, funded research projects. We also hope to encourage more community-based research. And we are incredibly grateful to Nicole Riggs, Cara Cordona, and Emma Karnes for their work, which CASP considers a form of constructive cannabis community organizing through education and research; and to Dr. Tony Silvaggio for his support for community based research.

Why Postprohibition?

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by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

I’m deeply unsatisfied with the ways we talk about cannabis legalization right now. Policymakers talk about it as a technical problem, opponents talk about it as a social threat, proponents talk about it as an end goal in itself, businesspeople talk about it as a financial gold rush, progressives talk about it as a social justice fix, and public health officials talk about it as a health risk, to name a few ways of talking about it that strike me as serving particular agendas that are different from mine.

I want to talk about legalization as a social problem.  Not because legalization as a general idea is a social problem, but because the way we are doing legalization isn’t making a clean break from prohibition. And prohibition has always been a really big social problem. This is why I want to talk about postprohibition: legalization with, not after, prohibition.

This makes things difficult, because I don’t think we really understand prohibition very well. This applies across the spectrum, including people who fight against prohibition as well as neo-Prohibitionists.

I think we understand prohibition as a legal problem pretty well, but not as a cultural problem. Laws reflect and institutionalize cultural values about what, and who, must be controlled by the State’s monopoly on violence in society.

The authority of the State to use that monopoly against people who use the wrong drugs the wrong way, in a liberal democracy, requires a fairly liberal tolerance of authoritarian attitudes throughout the population: a willingness to conduct war without end.

So to me, prohibition is one expression of authoritarian culture in a “free” society. It’s politics as the extension of war by other means. I’m not big on war, and I certainly object to the open-ended militarization of society against elements of its own population that aren’t hurting anyone else because they grow, distribute, or consume a plant.

I like plants. I think they teach us a lot about being a part of a living ecosystem, especially if we co-exist with them in ways that are more than commodified.

So if our current round of “experiments in democracy” that we call legalization are hamstrung by cultural attitudes about how dangerous a plant is; and how deferential we need to be towards still-actually-existing Federal Prohibition laws despite their really obviously political, rather than scientific, origins; then I have a problem with what legalization means and therefore how we talk about it.

There are many many ways to disagree with me about my problems with legalization that are really problems with democratic authoritarianism. But the demonstrably correct observation that new State and local legal frameworks exist alongside and in tension with National, Global, State, and Local cannabis prohibitions isn’t one of them.

So let’s start there, with the empirical fact that we are dealing with a complex legal landscape with conflicting and/or badly aligned elements. This observation does not lead necessarily to agreeing with my cultural analysis of postprohibition, but it does establish a common sense ground for talking about cannabis legalization beyond whether it’s good or evil.