After doing a thorough review of the social movement literature, I was able to build a theoretical vocabulary to explain this transition as a shifting of fields, from the political field to the commercial field. By working in the hybrid field of medical cannabis, I experienced the quotidian shifts in discourse and practice that facilitate the transition between these two fields of practice. The unique perspective I gained as an employee in a medical cannabis dispensary also gave me a front row seat to the framing strategies that people use at an active site, or modality, of drug policy reform. I was able to learn and practice the shift in diction that my fellow employees and I used to accomplish the discursive shift of changing a previously illicit substance into a legitimate or licit substance . On a practical level, by working at a dispensary I was able to meet other activists, medical cannabis patients, and attend numerous drug policy events as a volunteer. My status as an employee gave me entrée into the world of drug policy reform and also made my research feasible with minimal outside funding. I used participant observation to explore the sites where the drug policy movement constitutes itself. This element of the study looked at two locations where participants in this movement most often interact with one another face-to-face, festivals and conferences. As noted by social movement scholars, face-to-face interactions are necessary to supplement the technologically based networking of participants through the Internet and other communication technologies. In addition to providing demographic data about attendees, the public speakers, panel discussions and presentations at these events offered rich qualitative data about the movement. I used this data to analyze how drug policy reformers frame their actions and to discover the key concerns of movement actors. I also used these events as convenient places to gather literature from various organizations. In addition to attending hemp fests, and conferences hosted by organizations, I attended several types of meetings during the course of my research project. I attended monthly and annual meetings of organizations, city council meetings, and city medical cannabis indoor grow system task force or commission meetings. These various meetings proved to be excellent sites for gathering qualitative data on how organizations and city governments work to regulate the emergent phenomenon of medical cannabis.

To illuminate how organizations change drug policy, how various organizations work together, and the biographical dimensions of drug policy activism, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with the members of several different drug policy reform organizations. I employed a snowball sampling technique to reach the leaders and members of drug policy organizations. I sought out key figures in the medical cannabis movement to gain access to their unique knowledge of the movement’s history, policy outcomes , collaborating with other organizations and elite benefactors, and interactions with government officials. My interviews with key figures helped me to answer my research questions about the political opportunity structures that allow for novel drug policies. I also asked my interview subjects about their biographies, how they became involved in activism and what led to changes in their political consciousness. Occasionally, participants in the drug policy reform movement engage in public protest and acts of civil disobedience to decry existing drug policy and institute new policy arrangements. I attended and participated in a medical cannabis protest in November 2011. The events that precipitated the protest, the number and types of people in attendance and the slogans, speeches, and chants that the protesters used provided rich data for examining how medical marijuana is both a social movement and an industry. Under what circumstances do activists engage in civil disobedience? What metaphors, slogans and symbols do protestors deploy? By using interview data, however, I open myself up to issues that threaten internal validity. In addition to relying on the veracity of my informants, I also face the pitfalls of memory recall. According to Banks , the recollection of past stances is “notoriously subject to modifications over time.” I plan to increase the internal validity of my study by using corroborating sources, including newspapers and official documents . The success of the project hinges on my ability as an interviewer to gain the trust of informants, which in turn can lead to issues of sympathetic portrayals of subjects’ behavior.

Fenno argues that sympathy with subjects can detract from a researcher’s ability to be critical about data collection and research findings. Regarding reliability, because this research design relies heavily on my ability to gain entrée to a specific population, it would be impossible for a researcher without my connections to replicate the interviews that I conducted. Because I am using a non-probability snowball sampling technique, I do not contend that the findings of this research will be generalizable to other populations or to other medical cannabis reform movements. However, the findings of this project could contribute to general theories of activism and to specific analyses of drug policy innovation. I seek to contribute to our knowledge of how drug policy activists forge change under the repressive reality of US drug prohibition. It is my hope that this study will contribute to the sociology of social movement tactics that will be useful to other social movement scholars and activists. By using a hybrid approach to theory testing and theory building I seek to contribute new theoretical insights to the sociological field of social movements and drug policy.What unites the diverse organizations, funders and participants of the drug policy reform movement is a belief that prohibition as an overarching approach to dealing with illicit drug use creates many problems for individuals and society. Although not all organizations and individuals in the movement agree that prohibition should be rolled back in its entirety, all the organizations in the movement find at least some aspects of prohibition to create more problems than it solves. In the 1970s, organizations sought to decriminalize the adult use of cannabis because they viewed its prohibition as an affront to individual liberties, and because it relegated a whole class of otherwise law-abiding individuals to criminal status . In the 1980s, the harm reduction movement began as a public health based response to the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C among injection drug users. Eventually harm reduction blossomed into a philosophy under girding an alternative approach to drug problems . It was not until the mid 1980s that a wholly anti-prohibitionist branch of the movement coalesced around the issues of racial injustice and the prison boom, human rights and instability in drug producing countries , and a reintegration of earlier branches of the movement . All three branches of the movement actively challenge the discourse of drug prohibition,cannabis equipment in addition to specific policies sustained by the “drug control industrial complex” . At an abstract level, the various organizations and participants of the drug policy reform movement are engaging in a collective argument with supporters of drug prohibition. Billig uses a discursive approach to the conduct of social movements. In the tradition of social psychology, he emphasizes the importance of language for movements. “Social movements can be seen as a conducting arguments against prevailing common sense” . This makes the rhetorical tasks of social movements challenging because most attempts at persuasive discourse appeal to common sense. Essentially the movement argues “prohibition creates more problems than it solves.” As seen with the Occupy movement that began in New York City’s Wall Street district in September 2011, one of the most powerful effects a movement can have is on changing the national discussion or debate.

While sociologists and economists have decried income stratification, income inequality and the ever shrinking middle class in the U.S. for decades, the Occupy movement was able to shatter the commonly held and widely disseminated myth that the U.S. is overwhelmingly a middle class society typified by a high degree of mobility. Although politicians and journalists have decried the central tactic of the Occupy movement, by physically occupying public space the movement was able to change the public debate much more quickly than movements that rely primarily on social movement organizations to make things happen. What makes the argument particularly difficult for the movement to win is an imbalance in access to what I have termed the means of representation. Until the 1990s, supporters of prohibition have had privileged access to the means of representation. As I show in chapter two, the drug policy reform movement is using the Internet to address this disparity with increasing success. In addition to challenging the discourse of prohibition on the Internet and increasingly in the mainstream news media, the drug policy reform movement converges at conferences and hemp rallies to vocalize, experience, and broadcast its challenge to the discourse of drug prohibition. The movement challenges both the policies enforced in the name of prohibition and on a more abstract level, representations of drug users and drug use that prohibitionist discourses seek to portray. By challenging policies and representations that are part and parcel of those policies, the movement collapses a conceptual division that New Social Movements theorists including Alberto Melucci and Manuel Castells seek to draw, the idea that movements are about cultural stakes and not legal or political stakes. I consider the question of whether the drug policy reform movement seeks political or cultural change during my research, and will revisit this dichotomy in later chapters. At the outset, I wish to make it known that I am not only an academic observer of drug policy reform, but I am also an active participant. My position as both an advocate for and observer of drug policy reform presents a difficult balancing act. While I strive to objectively represent and analyze the drug policy reform movement, I wholeheartedly support the basic argument of drug policy reform; prohibition is an ineffective way to deal with drug use and it creates more harmful consequences than it addresses. By having a stake in the struggle I am writing about, I am following in a long line of social analysts who present an engaged view of the social problems they study. While taking a normative position on drug policy precludes me from any pretense of “values free” sociology, I do not recuse myself from the goal of presenting as objective a picture as possible of drug policy reform and medical marijuana. I first became conscious that people and organizations were seeking to reform cannabis laws in 1994. At that time, I had no idea that a wider drug policy reform movement existed. I attended a “hemp rally” in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. on the fourth of July, and was introduced to a loosely organized group of activists and speakers who had set up tables at the event. Activists were distributing literature, compiling mailing lists and talking to attendees. I was shocked that attendees were openly smoking cannabis within view of the White house. I was also shocked that somewhat formal looking organizations were in attendance. This small act of civil disobedience was remarkable to me for several reasons, it was collective, it was fun and I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself . The police did not arrest anyone, despite the rampant law breaking that was going on. During the event, attendees transformed cannabis smoking from a private act of criminality to a public statement of defiance. This experience opened my eyes to the political dimensions of drug use and to the existence of a collective challenge to drug policy. While attending college at the University of Virginia, my consciousness of the political ramifications of drug use and drug policy expanded greatly. I went to National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws meetings and learned about the consequences of drug use and policy from the experiences of several friends. During the year before I arrived at the school, the DEA had conducted a joint operation with local, state and university police that targeted LSD users on campus. In a series of sting operations, undercover police purchased LSD from several college students.