by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

The Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP) is proud to announce that we are partnering with the 2018 International Cannabis Policy Conference (ICPC2018) in Vienna, Austria. A previous post covered Dr. Tony Silvaggio’s invitation to present. Since then, the organizers also reached out to arrange a formal partnership at this international event that will take place on December 7-9, 2018.

The event’s location and time frame parallel the United Nations (UN) Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) meeting where the World Health Organization will present its scheduling recommendations on cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabis in all forms (December 5-7, Vienna). These organizations are Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGO), which means they represent interests developed by individual UN member countries in contrast with global civil society.

The CND gathering will be the last global meeting before the March 2019 High Level UN Session on Drug Policy, which will address the UN’s 2019-2029 agenda on drugs, and cannabis scheduling for it.

The ICPC2018 web site describes three purposes for the event. The first purpose is directly relevant to the CND meeting, the second is relevant to a “more-than-cannabis” global social issue, Sustainable Development, and the third is to provide a forum for attendees and presenters to learn from each other about what’s going on in their respective fields of action:

“The International Cannabis Policy Conference, December 7-9th 2018 is the last opportunity for external inputs from key stakeholders: researchers, NGOs, students, public officials, policymakers, private sector businesses, investors, and all other interested parties – on this very crucial issue.

Besides scheduling controls, this event presents the contribution of cannabis & industrial hemp markets and products innovations relevant to the achievements of the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), a global framework for sustainable societies.

The International Cannabis Policy Conference includes sessions with top research, industry and policy leaders and an exposition hall showcasing related food, products and services.“

The CASP Role 

My role at the event will be to carefully observe presentations and panels in order to present takeaways at the end of the day. Dr. Silvaggio will still be presenting his research on the environmental impacts of post-prohibition in California, as well.

We are incredibly grateful to FAAAT (For Alternative Approaches to Addiction Think and do tank) for inviting us to participate.

The FAAAT and CASP Fit

The ICPC2018, similarly to its main organizer NGO FAAAT, is a partnership of global drug war reform organizations — an assembly of international non-governmental organizations (INGO) that represent elements of civil society around the world that have as their common ground dissent to the global war on drugs.

We at CASP are proud to be a part of this process, as a US-based NGO for influencing cannabis policy and markets on behalf of ending the drug war, not just carving out a market exception to it.

by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

This morning I woke up to an email from Dr. Tony Silvaggio, our Senior Research Associate who is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Humboldt State University. He was being invited to present in Vienna, Austria, at the December International Cannabis Policy Conference (ICPC).

The ICPC is an overlapping and parallel conference at the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (UNCND). It is organized by FAAAT, For Alternative Approaches to Addiction Think and do tank. FAAAT is what we in the social sciences call a global civil society organization, or a Transnational Advocacy Network, or sometimes even an “alter-globalization” social movement organization. 

The UNCND produces a “World Plan of Action” report on the subject of drug control every 10 years. It is part of an ecology of what we call in the social sciences “global governance institutions” that form the “top layer” of legal frameworks for prohibition worldwide. The UNCND is a fairly old global institution. It was established in 1946. It has been a central node for the creation of prohibition’s global frameworks, along with other United Nations (UN) institutions like the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

That “top layer” is responsible for worldwide prohibition, but it has been changing in the last several decades. This process has been documented by the Transnational Institute’s (TNI) Drugs and Democracy program, another global civil society institution. Two of their academics, political scientist Martin Jelsma and historian David Beweley-Taylor, have been publishing for more than 20 years on how the drug war consensus has been destabilized in that top layer.

Anyway, although it’s short notice, Tony may be able to represent CASP in early December, given that his invitation specified his affiliation with us in particular, which is pretty cool and evidence of CASP’s global reach.

Popular Anxieties: Controlling Cannabis and Other Markets at the End of the World

by Dominic Corva, Political Geographer

This post is a preview of the talk I will give in Portland on September 27, 2018, hosted by the Commune PDX and the Initiative. The one hour lecture will include time for gathering before and after, between 6:30 and 9. Suggested donation at the door is $10, though anyone for whom this amount is a hardship is welcome regardless. Conversely, since the lecture serves as a fundraiser for The Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy, we are grateful for folks who can give more. The paragraph in bold serves both as a general abstract and introductory paragraph for an extended preview of the talk.

It is more important than ever to differentiate populist anxieties from ones grounded in real social problems for which we have plenty of evidence but weak individual and institutional capacity with which to deal. The liberation of a plant and its people from prohibition law and policy must contend not only with the persistence of prohibition culture, but broader anxieties about the way things are now, at large, for which legal cannabis markets may seem like adding fuel to the fire. This talk identifies the landscape of post-prohibition as embedded in wider anxieties about the world in which we live and what to do about it, as a political and economic history of the present.

The liberalization of cannabis control has arrived rather late to conditions of modernity that have been broadly characterized in the social sciences as “neoliberalism” for the last several decades. The second stage of cannabis prohibition, dating from 1971, emerged as a reaction against the people associated with the New Left of the 1960s, rather than scientific evidence that the plant itself posed a substantive public health threat to the population. The political and economic conditions that gave cannabis prohibition new life were part of the “culture wars” of the New Right — the generalization of anxieties about security in society at large.

That reaction was materialized as an extension of the welfare-warfare state, a massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex that fit uneasily alongside neoliberal tendencies to marketize public policy, deregulate financial markets, and, from the center-left, otherwise expand cultural freedoms. It was a security exception to the politics and economics of freedom, consolidated as a bipartisan consensus during the Clinton administration. Anxieties about public health are the cultural building blocks of prohibition culture, never mind the total absence of scientific evidence that formed them.

Anxieties about cannabis as a threat to public health and social order now form the institutional barriers to liberating, rather than liberalizing, cannabis from deeply institutionalized  politics and policies of control. Alongside these hoary obstacles to sensible public policy, though, the general political and economic winds that shape public policy at large have shifted against the direction of progressive change. Generalized economic, political and ecological crises — the “end of the world,” so to speak — inform popular anxieties about political and economic change that are quite different from the crises that gave rise to neoliberal consensus.

As a result, the liberation of cannabis from the politics of control must contend not only with the “dead” labor of deceit and ignorance at the root of prohibition culture, but with entirely reasonable contemporary anxieties about what 40 years of neoliberal governance has wrought: industrial-pesticidal agriculture; hydrocarbon-fueled ecological crisis; corporate, pay-to-play democracy; the pharmaceutical marketing of better living through chemistry fueling opioid dependence and generalized mental health crises; the triumph of the military-industrial complex through permanent warfare; and so forth.

We are clearly not making much progress towards evidence-based public policy, in general — otherwise it wouldn’t seem so much like the end of the world.  Why would we expect post-prohibition cannabis policy to work any better than public policy tendencies, at large? If another world is possible, the struggle for sensible cannabis policy must be linked with the struggle for political and economic conditions that make space for social peace and resilience rather than economic and political warfare.

by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

This year, the International Drug Policy Reform Conference (Reform) will be taking place next week in Atlanta, Georgia. This post lets our readers know about CASP’s presence at the Conference and what I will be doing there, as a participant in a panel titled “How has the Drug War Reshaped Space, Place, and Relationships?”

There are three kinds of public events CASP gets invited to speak at. Industry events provide a platform for addressing cannabis policy and markets in a way that reflects our commitment to optimizing cannabis legalization as a strategy for ending the drug war. Academic events provide a platform for reflecting on and improving the models of the world I work with and encounter. And Policy events provide me with a platform for direct intervention into ongoing discussions of policy formation.

The Reform conference is a bit of a hybrid between Academic and Policy events. It’s an international NGO (nongovernmental organization) production, hosted by the Drug Policy Alliance and the ACLU, which often partners with the DPA on domestic efforts. You can see from the title of the panel how academic the conversation is to be on my panel, which could be the title of a panel at the annual Association of American Geographers (AAG) Conference I presented at for most of my academic life.

As a result, it’s probably the sort of panel that I feel most comfortable in. I’m not industry, and in Policy conferences where bureaucrats and policymakers dominate I’m usually the most radical voice in the room, since my central concern is ending the drug war rather than doing politics. Or bureaucracy.

This panel is especially cool because it’s a conversation, rather than a group of individual presentations. The moderator for the panel recently reached out to prepare for the conversation by posing three or four questions with which we would like to engage. I offer the questions I sent back, and the reasons for doing so, here:

“Creative destruction” is a political economy term I learned about from studying Karl Polanyi, the Austro-Hungarian economic historian. It means that there’s a cost to market formation — that previous market and social orders are destroyed to make way for new engines of growth. It’s usually associated with urban gentrification or crisis profiteering. Under conditions of prohibition, the whole world is a drug war zone, as anthropologist Howard Campbell observes, but some spots are hotter than others: borders, inner cities and so forth. This is a broader question for which cannabis legalization provides some insight, particularly with respect to who can own the means of cannabis production in highly controlled markets with high barriers to entry. Headlines splash how many jobs are created by such markets, but what goes unsaid is to whom the gains accrue. The democratic aspect of informal cannabis markets was that everyone could be an owner or take a much better margin of the flows than they could as a $15/hour waged laborer. This spread the economic benefits of market development much wider than under conditions where you need half a million or a regulatory job to make much of a living. At the same time, however, there is a lot of truth to the claim that legal cannabis displaces the ability of highly organized crime to make much off of cannabis, any more. Cartel profits don’t accrue to the little people so much, and while I insist that cartel profits have been dwindling under conditions of medical cannabis (with a far more democratic and widely shared economy), I can’t ignore the truth that in general, we want to destroy the ability of those who use violence to manage risk to make anything.

So, that’s it. Those are my questions for the panel, and my preliminary thoughts about them. It will take place next week, Thursday, in Atlanta, Georgia. I am grateful to the Drug Policy Alliance for covering my flight and hotel room, for full disclosure.

How has the Drug War Reshaped Space, Place, and Relationships?

Thursday, October 12th, 4:30-6:00pm | Dogwood B Room, Floor M1

From prison towns to million dollar blocks (where more than a million dollars is spent to incarcerate men from one city block), drug policy is shaping what our communities and relationships look like. This session will explore: How has the drug war reshaped geography in the U.S.? What impact do these changes have on individuals and families? How does spatial shifts over time affect communities most impacted by the war on drugs? What are some current projects and solutions underway to address these shifts in geography?