Making Marijuana Medical: Governing Bodies in Minnesota's Medical Cannabis Program
2022-06
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Making Marijuana Medical: Governing Bodies in Minnesota's Medical Cannabis Program
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2022-06
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For over a century, the defining, distribution, regulation, and punitive control of so-called ‘dangerous drugs’ has been a central feature of State policies and institutional practices in the US (and across the globe). The War on Drugs—which refers to the various punitive drug control-related policies and practices enacted over the last century—has assembled together a vast array of institutions, resources, and practices to authoritatively govern the use of ‘drugs’ (as defined by the State) and drug using bodies. Virtually no social institutions have been untouched by the Drug War, including medicine, criminal justice, the State, corporate manufacturing, the family, labor/employment, and culture, among others. Not only have they all been affected by the Drug War, but I argue they have been deeply shaped by it—that these institutions’ development has emerged in historically specific ways by their constitutive relationships to the Drug War. In that sense, the Drug War can be thought of as a machine made up of a variety of institutions (and the bodies that comprise them) that fit together and are configured in specific ways and, thereby, reconfigure and constitute each of these parts in the process. From this machinery, specific forms of governance are produced, affecting all that comes into contact with it and its apparatuses. This dissertation examines the ways in which the Drug War continues to operate in an era of medicalized drug reform through an in-depth case study of Minnesota’s medical cannabis program, which is one of the most restrictive in the US. By examining legislative hearings, professional position statements, in-depth interviews with medical cannabis patients, institutional and policy analysis, survey data from healthcare professionals, analysis of state-collected program data, and four years of ethnographic observation, this study provides insights into the institutional configurations of the program, the forms of governance it produces, and the consequences for patient bodies in their everyday lives.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2022. Major: Sociology. Advisors: Joshua Page, Teresa Gowan. 1 computer file (PDF); 306 pages.
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Steel, Ryan. (2022). Making Marijuana Medical: Governing Bodies in Minnesota's Medical Cannabis Program. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/241619.
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