BARNEY ACTOR DRUG CRIME SERIES

We analyze the way a quasi-judicial investigation into the consumption of cannabis products (ganja and jaras) was differently conceived and executed as a civilizing mission by, on the one hand, British colonizers, and, on the other hand, an aspiring colonized elite. This paper examines a particular episode in the history of British imperialism in India: the appointment of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission in 1893. I close by assessing some of the policy and research implications of this divergence, offering an approach to cannabis more accommodating of its ontological proliferations. Cannabis is constituted as medicine in debates regarding ‘medical marijuana’, as a non-drug in cultures and practices indicative of the normalisation of cannabis, and finally as a drug in statutes prohibiting ‘cannabis’ use, and the biomedical research which legitimizes this prohibition. The ‘object-materialities’ at work in the production of cannabis effectively distribute the drug across the three ontological registers commonly used to differentiate psychoactive substances: medicine, non-drug and drug. I argue that cannabis should not be regarded as a stable, singular entity, given the diversity of relations, practices, semiotic registers and political squabbles in which the drug is produced as an object of knowledge and practice. Alert to the ontological contingency of cannabis, the chapter exposes the heterogeneity of the drug, its divergent natures, cultures and materialities.

BARNEY ACTOR DRUG CRIME SERIES

The fifth section offers an overview of cannabis's contested history in the United States, in which a series of early 20 th-century moral panics led to its demonization later, the drug enjoyed gradual liberalization.ĭrawing from the Actor-Network-Theory of John Law and Bruno Latour, this chapter departs from ‘common-sense’ accounts of the ontological identity of drugs such as cannabis to explore the myriad relations in which cannabis is enacted. Next, it turns to its expansion under colonialism, including deliberate cultivation by Portuguese and British authorities in the New World as part of the construction of a pacified labor force. Following a brief theorization, it explores the plant's early uses in East and South Asia, its shift to the Middle East, and resultant popularity in the Arab world and Africa. Situating the topic within varied perspectives such as world-systems theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, and the moral economy of drugs, this paper charts its diffusion over several millennia, noting the contingent and uneven ways in which it was enveloped within varying social and political circumstances. Cannabis, including hemp and its psychoactive counterpart, has a long but largely overlooked historical geography.

Barney actor drug crime