Cannabis Criminology explores the prohibition, decriminalization, and liberalization of cannabis policy through the lens of criminological and sociological theory, essential concepts, and cannabis research. It does so by focusing on five thematic areas: law, society, and social control; police and policing; race, ethnicity, and criminalization; the economics of cannabis; and cannabis use and crime. It is the first book on cannabis since President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2022 to pardon citizens and lawful permanent residents convicted of simple cannabis possession under federal law and DC statute. Cannabis is now legal in some form in 37 US states. To understand the reform of cannabis policy and the challenges to come, we first need to understand the connections between cannabis and criminology. The book links key areas in past and contemporary cannabis research to criminological and sociological theories, including key concepts, emergent concerns, and new directions. Based on an up-to-date review of this growing area of research, the book outlines a research program based on five essential thematic areas. Introducing cannabis as a critical case study in moral-legal re-negotiation, it outlines how cannabis prohibition has influenced cannabis around the world. Five discrete chapters focus on thematic areas, criminological and sociological theories, define essential concepts, and provide research focused on law, society, and social control (Chapter 2), police and policing cannabis (Chapter 3), race, ethnicity, and criminalization (Chapter 4), the economics of cannabis (Chapter 5), and cannabis and crime (Chapter 6). The book concludes by presenting new ways to engage prohibitionist thinking, by challenging myths, embracing social media, and developing a duty of care to guide future cannabis researchers and explicitly involve people who use cannabis. Cannabis Criminology will be of interest to a variety of readers, including students and scholars from a range of backgrounds studying drug use, drug policy, cannabis legalization, and other drug-related issues. It will also appeal to policymakers who want to know more about cannabis legalization and drug prohibition, those working in the criminal justice system, and social work professionals. Due to its accessible style, people involved in the cannabis industry, as well as cannabis users may also find the book interesting.

America’s drug laws have always exerted an unequal and unfair toll on Blacks and Latinos, who are arrested more often than Whites for the possession of illegal drugs and given harsher sentences. In this volume, contributors ask how would marijuana legalization affect communities of color? Is legalization of marijuana necessary to safeguard minority families from a lifetime of hardship and inequality? Who in minority communities favors legalization and why, and do these minority opinions differ from the opinions held by White Americans? This volume also includes analyses of the policy debate by a range of scholars addressing economic, health, and empowerment issues. Comparative lessons from other countries are also analyzed.

A drug policy classic reprint -- a comprehensive history of marijuana use and prohibition in the United States.

Visions of Cannabis Control argues that cannabis prohibition is the result of moral panic that has been instigated, perpetuated, and sustained in ways that are difficult to dislodge. The book documents the history of these cannabis policies and explores the impact of issues such as racism, labelling, and stigmatization. Stan Cohen argued that reforms designed to replace carceral tendencies within correctional institutions can instead extend such approaches into our communities. The idea that criminal justice reforms often reproduce what they were intended to disrupt can be applied to the cannabis revolution currently underway around the world. Racial disparities in arrests persist, exacerbated by laws that make it legal to possess cannabis but illegal to consume it anywhere but in your home. In this book, the authors argue that too often, cannabis liberalization comes at the cost of expanding paternalistic public health models and abstention-based diversion programs. The goal of dismantling and disrupting illicit markets has undermined onerous regulations, anaemic marketing efforts, and failure to promote consumer-centred approaches. Emphasizing public health goals ahead of market conditions complicates legal cannabis as an industry. To understand the future of cannabis policy, Visions of Cannabis Control examines the experience of six countries and several US states through the lens of criminological theory, recent research, and practice. The book presents several solutions for responsible regulation concluding that sustaining reform will require a more inclusive approach ensuring those affected by cannabis policies are consulted, respected, and involved.

Engaged Criminology invites students to learn and think like a criminologist by incorporating real-life examples and hands-on activities that get students doing criminology rather than just retaining definitions.

This book demonstrates how culture matters for the understanding of cannabis use. It stems from the growing body of research on how users manoeuvre stigmatisation and celebrate the subcultural status of cannabis amid rapid transformation of the substance and its societal reception. The volume presents international studies that challenge the normalisation thesis and simplified views on patterns of use, as well as the Western bias in social research of cannabis. Chapters in this book map the variability of cannabis cultures and markets on a global scale including digital, regulated and illicit markets in transformation. They study cannabis through stigmatisation, gender, social worlds, symbolic boundaries, subcultures, and identity work. The chapters address diverse themes, such as how Latvian, Polish, Nigerian or Mexican users negotiate mainstream conservative, and sometimes gendered societal reactions to cannabis - and how Nordic users’ identities are played out in more progressive contexts. Chapters also cover cannabis use by older people and small growers’ cultures in the US and the interconnections between the established cultures and their digital augmentation in Australia. Synthetic cannabis use is studied in New Zealand and the many contradictions of contemporary cannabis policies are highlighted throughout. Taken together, this book offers an assortment of studies that provide a descriptive and conceptual snapshot of ongoing transitions of paradoxically stable cannabis cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy.

Marijuana is the most widely used illegal drug in the world. Over the past couple of decades, several Western jurisdictions have seen reforms in, or changes to, the way cannabis use is being controlled, departing from traditional approaches of criminal prohibition that have dominated cannabis use control regimes for most of the twentieth century. While reform is stalled at the international level, the last decade has seen an acceleration of legislative and regulatory reforms at the local and national levels, with countries no longer willing to bear the human and financial costs of prohibitive policies. Furthermore, legalization models have been implemented in US states, Canada and Uruguay, and are being debated in a number of other countries. These models are providing the world with unique pilot programs from which to study and learn. This book assembles an international who’s who of cannabis scholars who bring together the best available evidence and expertise to address questions such as: How should we evaluate the models of cannabis legalization as they have been implemented in several jurisdictions in the past few years? Which scenarios for future cannabis legalization have been developed elsewhere, and how similar/different are they from the models already implemented? What lessons from the successes and failures experienced with the regulation of other psychoactive substances (such as alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceuticals and “legal highs”) can be translated to the effective regulation of cannabis markets? Legalizing Cannabis will appeal to anyone interested in public health policies and drug policy reform and offers relevant insights for stakeholders in any other country where academic, societal or political evaluations of current cannabis policies (and even broader: current drug policies) are a subject of debate.