Abstract
Marijuana has been at the center of contestation and controversy in the United States for more than a century. Clayton Mosher and Scott Akins’s In the Weeds: Demonization, Legalization, and the Evolution of U.S. Marijuana Policy takes on the political, cultural, economic, and public health dimensions of marijuana’s complicated history, distilling it into a short and readable book. While sociologists may be familiar with the broad strokes of marijuana’s political and cultural history, the authors empirically ground this history through a review and synthesis of sociological, economic, historical, medical, and public policy research.
The authors argue that marijuana prohibition “constitutes a historical anomaly” (p. v). They make the case that the 59-year period between marijuana’s federal prohibition under the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 and medical marijuana’s legalization in California in 1996 was a blip in the history of the flowering herb, which has been used for millennia as a medicine, intoxicant, and spiritual aid. In the Weeds reviews the actors, discourses, and actions that first led to the growth of prohibitory institutions and then the rise of policy reforms pushing back against prohibition. Mosher and Akins weigh the arguments of proponents and opponents of marijuana’s legality against the medical and behavioral research on the substance and conclude that leading authorities and policy experts have overestimated the negative effects of marijuana while neglecting its positive effects.
The authors set the scene by surveying the development, maintenance, and growth of institutions prohibiting marijuana. They do so by providing a detailed legal history of prohibition in the United States. Throughout this section they contrast enacted policy with contemporaneous expert and scientific opinion. While doctors and social scientists stressed that marijuana was an innocuous substance that could prove medically beneficial, federal administrations repeatedly classified it as a dangerous and addictive narcotic.
Next the authors describe the current state of research on marijuana’s dangers and medical applications. After detailing the chemical composition of marijuana and how its cannabinoids affect the human brain and body, the authors examine the evidence regarding marijuana’s toxicity, addictiveness, and potential adverse effects. Mosher and Akins apply this medical and public health research to challenge myths regarding marijuana, such as its status as a “gateway drug,” noting that marijuana could serve as an off-ramp rather than a precursor for opioid addiction. They also catalog research on the various conditions medical marijuana may help.
Throughout the book, the authors tackle common themes that prohibitionists have used to demonize marijuana and oppose legalization efforts. For example, they review scientific literature on marijuana use and cognitive deficit/lower IQ, showing that this link is tenuous at best. They also draw on research to challenge arguments commonly used to oppose legalization, such as the link between legalization and increased teen use.
Mosher and Akins help situate the debate over marijuana’s legality by analyzing the positions and actions of actors supporting prohibition. For example, they show how state actors such as the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Drug Enforcement Agency, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and law enforcement actors at various levels of government have used cherry-picked data and faulty logic to justify prohibitory institutions. They also describe how non-state actors with vested economic and political interests, such as the pharmaceutical industry and beer and liquor distributors, have opposed marijuana legalization.
This book is not just about prohibition but also about reform and legalization. After making the case that marijuana’s legal status has diverged from scientific evidence, the authors review the state of marijuana policy reform in the United States. Much as they highlighted positions and actions of agents of prohibition, Mosher and Akins also discuss the role of pro-marijuana activists such as Drug Policy Alliance, NORML, and the Marijuana Policy Project in mobilizing support and developing a legal foundation for marijuana markets. The authors conclude by going state by state and describing the various ballot initiatives and legislation that led to the formation of medical and recreational marijuana markets. In doing so, they compare and contrast the various dimensions of this patchwork of regulatory regimes.
While the main focus of this book is on marijuana prohibition and reform in the United States, the authors also put the U.S. experience in a comparative perspective. They show how the divide between expert opinion and policy that was foundational to the rise and expansion of prohibition was not unique to the United States but also took place in countries such as Great Britain and Australia. Similarly, they show how drug reform in the United States has been mirrored and, in some cases, outpaced by reform in other countries such as Uruguay, Canada, and parts of Europe.
In the Weeds is a work of public sociology that earns this title. It is both an argument for empirically grounded policy and a curated reference that surveys the current state of medical, public health, and behavioral research on marijuana. In the Weeds straddles the line between a book that is for academic and lay audiences. It is written in a way that is accessible to the general public while also providing fodder for social scientists interested in studying the marijuana industry or using this context as a point of comparison. This makes the book an enjoyable read but may leave sociologists yearning for a more explicit application of social theory. Nonetheless, the secondary analysis central to In the Weeds would make it a useful reference for sociologists, particularly those in the subfields of political, economic, organizational, and cultural sociology, as well as the sociology of stigma and deviance.