My research explores the transition of marijuana from an illegal to medical and recreational commodity. You can see some of my writing here, here, and here. My research lies at the intersection of political, legal, economic, and medical anthropology and is in conversation with human geography, sociology and legal studies.
I am currently writing a book manuscript for the University of Minnesota Press about the material and discursive production of marijuana in rural Northern California. The manuscript focuses on the entry of marijuana producers into civil politics from the late 2000s to the present. This entry marked a pivotal move toward legalization as it challenged the supply-side interdiction strategy so central to the War on Drugs. In the manuscript I trace how illegalized producers became covertly, though centrally, integrated into the political economy of two Northern California regions since the 1980s, patient-cultivators carved out an exceptional space to marijuana prohibition, and over the past decade a new wave of producer politics has emerged. This producer politics paved the way for legalization, a transformed political economy and ecology in rural Northern California, and new forms of power and possibility for all those involved in the social production of marijuana.