Research Paper
The three betrayals of the medical cannabis growing activist: From multiple victimhood to reconstruction, redemption and activism

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.12.004Get rights and content

Abstract

While cannabis has been widely used in the UK for over 50 years, it is only in recent decades that domestic cultivation has become established. Public concern, media reporting and policing policy has emphasised the role of profit motivated criminal organisations often working on a large scale and with coerced labour. However, increasingly, another population are growing for medical reasons, to help themselves and others treat or manage difficult, poorly understood, or incurable conditions.

Our study sought to further understand the motives, techniques and interactions of cannabis cultivators through interviews with 48 growers and supplementary ethnographic work. As well as those motivated to grow for personal use, social and commercial supply purposes we identified a cohort growing to provide themselves and others with cannabis used for therapeutic purposes. This paper draws primarily on interviews with a sub-group of sixteen medically-motivated growers who were not only involved in treatment, but also embraced the label “activist”.

Rather than develop techniques of deception they were organising to effect a change in legislation. Rejecting the image of criminal perpetrators, they presented themselves as victims of unjust government policy, an indifferent medical establishment, and brutal and immoral criminal markets. Through cultivation, association, self-healing and apomedication, they have found voice and are shifting the debate over the status of growers and of cannabis itself. The ambiguity of their position as both producers and patients challenges the assumptions underlying legal distinctions between suppliers and users, with potentially profound implications for policy.

Introduction

Cannabis continues to enjoy an ambiguous status in the UK. It is a Class B drug with strict penalties for possession and supply, but consumption is not a crime per se1 and police rarely bring charges and do not go proactively looking for people in possession of small amounts.2 Prominent anti-cannabis campaigners have cited the falling number of cannabis arrests in their claim that to all intents and purposes cannabis consumption has been decriminalised (Hitchens, 2012). The numbers are indeed low considering that 16% of 16–24 year olds are reportedly using cannabis (Home Office, 2016). However, there remains a significant rump of cannabis users who do face sanctions, and criminal records, for production and supply.

The UK, as other European countries, subscribes to a “balanced approach” (Home Office, 2015), making a sharp distinction between consumption, with its associated potential health and socioeconomic harms, and supply, dealt with by the police and courts. This has allowed the state to maintain an uncompromising prohibitionist policy stance even while consumption is becoming socially embedded with stable drug prices and ready availability. Import substitution continues apace, with cannabis resin from Morocco largely replaced by domestically produced herbal cannabis (Hargreaves and Smith, 2015, Potter, 2010).

It has been estimated that around 300,000–500,000 people are now growing cannabis in the UK.3 Cultivation ties up financial resources, encroaches on indoor living space, greatly increases the risk of detection and facilitates the prosecution with incontrovertible material evidence as well as demonstrating mens rea. The question therefore arises why so many people are willing to risk criminalisation by amplifying their offence from cannabis possession to cultivation and supply.

The paper explores the motivation of a sub-set of cannabis cultivators who use cannabis therapeutically, or supply cannabis to people with medical conditions who find relief from using different cannabis preparations.

Section snippets

Methods

We were awarded a small grant from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust4 to study cannabis cultivation in the UK, with a focus on initiation into and progression of cannabis growing careers. We opted for an inductive, ethnographic approach in the anthropological tradition, with in-depth qualitative interviews and observations of real life situations, as best suited for establishing an understanding of motivation and outlook. From previous work we hypothesized that

Victimless crimes reconsidered − medical cultivators as anomalies in the drug war dramaturgy

By cultivating cannabis and sharing the product with other users our informants had moved from petty offender to criminal perpetrator of a class B supply offence, which carries potentially up to 14 years imprisonment. Craig opened with the familiar assertion of the victimless crime: “if I am not hurting anyone what is that crime”. He then turned the more serious charge of drug production around, arguing that he was in fact helping to reduce overall criminality: “I am not contributing to a

Inadvertent cultivators

Cultivators often presented their lives as journeys beginning with the life-changing illness and a series of cumulative events, such as the discovery of cannabis, quests for greater knowledge, encounters with significant teachers, and the decision to start growing. The stories contain elements of what the anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) describes as the ritual progress and, subsequently, the idea of social drama. Individuals experiencing a crisis that breaches the common norm are pushed

Three betrayals

Already let down by their bodies, our activist medical growers identified three other ways in which they felt betrayed: by the legal system that labels them as criminals, by conventional medicine that cannot help them, and by criminal operatives in the illegal cannabis market.

Reconstituting selfhood

The situation, as seen by our respondents, can be easily summarised. People with a medical need for cannabis but criminalised by government, denounced by their doctors and cheated in the underground markets, find themselves the victim of successive betrayals. Their rupture with prevailing norms is no wilful pursuit of egotistical or hedonistic ends, but an act of self-preservation. The resulting anomie, in the Durkheim (1893) sense of “derangement” as a mismatch of standards between the group

Medical cannabis healers and apomedication

Doug, who works cannabis butter into a poultice that he applies to his injured rotary cuff, is proud to share his homemade medication. Discussing the dissemination of therapeutic expertise on cannabis in Canada, Penn (2014) noted the critical role of dispensaries organised into the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries (CAMCD) in forming an “embodied health movement”. Less formally in the UK, individuals, small-scale producers such as the CBD brothers and loose, unrecognised

Conclusion

There is still a lack of clear scientific understanding about when and how cannabis − and which constituent cannabinoids − does effectively treat particular medical conditions, and it may be that for some medical users effects are palliative rather than curative. Nevertheless, many people clearly perceive medical benefits − sometimes very strong benefits − from their cannabis use.

Further, we acknowledge that our sample are both extreme and ‘ideal’ cases of medical cannabis growers, and that

Conflict of interest

We confirm there are no conflicts of interest for either author.

References (43)

  • T. Decorte

    Small scale domestic cannabis cultivation: An anonymous Web survey among 659 cannabis cultivators in Belgium

    Contemporary Drug Problems

    (2010)
  • DoH [Department of Health] (2012). The Expert Patient: A New Approach to Chronic Disease Management for the 21 st...
  • Dunn, J. (2016) Police ‘have given up on cannabis' as just one in four caught with the drug are charged Daily Mail 3rd...
  • Durkheim, E., (1893/1960). The Division of Labor in Society. (G. Simpson, Trans.) New York: The Free...
  • G. Eysenbach

    Medicine 2.0: social networking, collaboration, participation, apomediation, and openness

    Journal of Medical Internet Research

    (2008)
  • B. Glaser et al.

    The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for qualitative research

    (1967)
  • F. Grotenhermen et al.

    Survey on the medical use of cannabis and THC in Germany

    Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics

    (2003)
  • P. Hakkarainen et al.

    Examining the blurred boundaries between medical and recreational cannabis −Results from an international study of small-scale cannabis cultivation

    Drugs: Education Prevention & Policy

    (2018)
  • P. Hakkarainen

    Vaporizing the pot world −easy, healthy, and cool

    Drugs and Alcohol Today

    (2016)
  • Hall, J. & Camber, R. One cannabis plant seized every minute with one force alone finding 1,000 a week Daily Mail 2nd...
  • Cited by (18)

    • Conflict and social control among cannabis growers

      2023, International Journal of Drug Policy
    • Association of cannabinoid receptor modulation with normal and abnormal skeletal remodelling: A systematic review and meta-analysis of in vitro, in vivo and human studies

      2022, Pharmacological Research
      Citation Excerpt :

      Whilst these studies clearly implicate cannabinoid receptors and their ligands in bone metabolism, the use of a plethora of different models, strain of animals and synthetic and natural ligands that directly or indirectly regulate the endocannabinoid system yielded inconsistent conclusions [10,11,27]. Over recent years, increasing social acceptance of preparations of the psychoactive delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9-THC) and non-psychoactive cannabidiol (CBD) – the major bioactive cannabinoids in Cannabis sativa - have accelerated the availability, use, domestic cultivation and legalisation for both recreational and medicinal use around the globe [31–36]. This raised concerns about the risk for developing various disorders, including skeletal diseases, and necessitates the need for examination of the evidence that implicates pharmacological and genetic modulation of the endocannabinoid system in skeletal disorders.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text