Places whose citizens grant legitimacy to cannabis might not be ready to publicly display cannabis within their territories. Potential tax revenues and employment opportunities are not worth the moral trade-off for middle- and upper-class communities. For example, Santa Monica and Laguna Beach residents were among the strongest supporters of cannabis legalization—75% and 62% of cannabis support, respectively—but their city governments banned any cannabis-related economic activities. Both Santa Monica and Laguna Beach are predominantly non-Hispanic and wealthy.88 In contrast, economically and socially disadvantaged cities have to rely on potential tax revenues and jobs generated by legal cannabis businesses and, thus, permit cannabis companies even without public support. Take, for example, Calexico and Firebaugh, whose citizens did not support cannabis legalization , but city governments permitted cannabis companies. Both cities are predominantly Hispanic and poor . Irvine and Santa Ana—cases that are familiar to most UCI residents—are yet another example of the disparity between supply and demand. Irvine residents supported cannabis legalization at higher rates than Santa Ana residents . However, Santa Ana permitted all kinds of cannabis-related economic activities and has more than 20 cannabis dispensaries, and Irvine allowed only cannabis testing labs. Remarkably, Irvine has 9.7% of the Hispanic population, and Santa Ana—77.3%. In Outsiders, Howard Becker defines three types of social control of cannabis use: limiting supply and access to the drug; keeping nonusers from discovering that one is a user; defining the act as immoral. Since Becker published his book, cannabis has been depenalized,heavy duty propagation trays decriminalized, and finally legalized in California. Although the situation has significantly improved in terms of supply and access to cannabis, the stigmatization of cannabis use is still a pressing issue in the legal cannabis market.

The war on drugs generated various misconceptions about cannabis, which detrimentally affected public perceptions. First, despite scientific research showing that cannabis is no more harmful than nicotine or alcohol, some people still believe that cannabis is a gateway drug to heavier substances that induces criminal activity and violence.89 Second, although most people recognize the medicinal benefits of cannabis , they continue to disfavor the recreational use of cannabis, perceiving it as a non-conforming and risky behavior and its users as weak and non-productive members of society. Finally, people who tolerate the recreational use of cannabis in private spaces do not always accept its public display and consumption. Agreeing with legalization as a concept, Californians are not ready to embrace it entirely and allow dispensaries in their own neighborhoods—this occasionally leads to their obtaining court rulings against cannabis-growing operations.The drug problem cannot be adequately understood without examining the underpinning issues of poverty and disadvantage.There is nothing inherently criminogenic about drugs, nor drugs necessarily relate to poverty. Stigmatization of drug use is a product of a culture in which the consumption of pleasurable intoxicants is deemed intolerable and punishable. Drug use is a heavily moralized territory, and the lower social strata suffer worse outcomes than more affluent people for the same drug-related behavior . The literature on the history of drugs portrays drug regulation as a moral tale, in which the “blurry lines between us and them, privileged and repressed, strong and weak, keep getting rewritten as the boundaries between good and evil” . Existing at all social levels, drug use is recognized as a problem in specific social contexts—namely, it is clustered in the communities suffering already from multiple socio-economic difficulties . Even if the number of cannabis arrests is declining every year,Hispanics and African Americans continue to be disproportionately arrested.

In California, in 2019, Hispanics accounted for 41.7% of cannabis felony arrests, African Americans for 22.3%, and whites for 21.3%.Despite the fact that cannabis consumption rates are higher among whites, they are less likely to be arrested for cannabis-related offenses .The idea behind socio-spatial control is that deviance should be contained within designated territories, i.e., if objects, practices, and behaviors do not fit the existing social order, they are to be spatially excluded. In this chapter, I tested the reverse hypothesis, i.e., if things are geographically put out of place, it means that they are viewed as socially undesirable and inappropriate. The statistical analysis shows that city governments act as moral entrepreneurs when deciding whether they want to forbid or allow legal cannabis businesses. The prohibition erastereotypes continue to influence the development of the legal cannabis market: most jurisdictions decide to keep aloof from spoiled identities and tainted places associated with cannabis use, even at the cost of not reaping financial rewards. On the contrary, economically disadvantaged communities with a larger Hispanic population are more likely to permit cannabis dispensaries because: they have higher financial incentives, and they have lower reputational risks. Since these communities are already marginalized and associated with crime, disadvantage, and social exclusion, having legal cannabis dispensaries will not exacerbate their stigmatization.A secondary aim was to conduct an exploratory analysis examining group-by-sex interactions on risky decision-making in young adult college students. Since we were interested in examining decision making within active MJ users who were not yet undergoing cannabis withdrawal, we asked participants to remain abstinent from all substance use for 12 h prior to the study visit to attempt to avoid any withdrawal symptoms that may contribute to impairments in decision making. We hypothesized that frequent MJ users would have poorer performance than healthy controls, indicated by lower net IGT scores; frequent MJ users would show faster reaction times in card selection compared with healthy controls, which would reflect greater impulsive tendencies during decision-making; and younger age at first MJ use, greater cumulative MJ use and greater recent MJ use would be related to lower net IGT scores in MJ users.Sixty-five participants, 18–22 years old, completed the study. All participants were native English speakers currently enrolled in college or university. Of these participants, 32 were healthy controls and 33 were frequent MJ users.

Exclusionary criteria included uncorrected visual impairments, pregnancy, lack of fluency in English, self-reported lifetime history of a diagnosed psychiatric disorder or learning disability, self-reported current use of psychotropic medications, major neurological/medical illness or significant head trauma, prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol, premature birth and reported history of psychotic disorders in immediate family of biological relatives. Additional exclusion criteria for healthy controls included: significant substance use history , any history of heavy episodic alcohol use: >5 drinks/occasion for males and >4 drinks/ occasion for females, >90 lifetime days of cigarette use, MJ use more than once/month in the past year and any other lifetime illicit drug use. Inclusionary criteria for frequent MJ users was ≥5 occasions of MJ use/week in the past year. Given the comorbidity of MJ and alcohol use , alcohol use was assessed but not exclusionary for the MJ+ group. MJ+ reporting >15 lifetime occasions of other illicit substance use combined across substances were excluded from study participation. While no participants reported lifetime history of a psychiatric disorder, scores from the Cannabis Use Disorders Identification Test-Revised indicated 23 MJ+ met criteria for a possible cannabis use disorder.Participants were recruited through flyers posted around the community and at MJ dispensaries as well as through social media advertising. Written consent was obtained from participants who contacted the laboratory to complete an interview to determine eligibility for the study. Following an eligibility interview, eligible participants were invited to take part in a study visit that included measures of substance use and psychosocial functioning as well as neurocognitive tasks of executive functioning. All participants were asked to abstain from substance use for at least 12 h prior to the study visit to limit effects of acute intoxication on neurocognitive measures. No participants appeared intoxicated at the time of the study visit. After providing consent for participating in the study visit, participants provided a urine sample for a 12-panel urine toxicology test and completed a breathalyzer test to confirm absence of alcohol intoxication. All MJ+ had a positive urine toxicology screen for THC, while all HC had a negative urine toxicology screen for THC. Further, all participants had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.00 at the time of the study visit. A nicotine metabolite test for cotinine was not conducted for this study; thus, recent nicotine use was assessed through self-report. At the end of the study visit,participants were compensated with an Amazon e-gift card. All study procedures were approved by the Oregon State University Institutional Review Board and were in accordance with ethical guidelines of research with human participants.Participants completed a brief demographics questionnaire, vertical cannabis which included questions on race, and socioeconomic status . As many college students in this age range lack personal income, we asked participants to select their perceived socioeconomic status . Additionally, participants were asked to estimate lifetime alcohol, MJ and cigarette use, and to report all substance use in the past 30 days using the Timeline Follow back procedure. Participants also reported age at first use for alcohol, MJ and cigarettes. All participants completed a 2-subtest version of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence-II. Here, we report on the findings from the Iowa Gambling Task , one of the tasks from a larger neurocognitive assessment that was selected as a measure of risky decision-making.

Findings from other tasks included in the larger neurocognitive assessment have been previously reported .Data were analyzed using IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences . For parametric, normally distributed data, independent samples t-tests were used to examine group differences on demographic variables and reaction times in card selection on the IGT with a significance value set at p < 0.05. Mann-Whitney U-tests were used to examine group differences on substance use variables that violated normality , including past 30 day and lifetime substance use variables. Using a repeated measures ANCOVA with age and IQ as co-variates, we investigated group differences on net IGT scores across five bins, each consisting of 20 trials. Substance use variables not normally distributed were log-transformed to improve normality and were examined in relation to IGT performance using Pearson correlations. Finally, an exploratory analysis using a repeated measures ANCOVA examined the main effect of group, sex and their interaction on net IGT scores, controlling for age and IQ.This study examined the relationship between frequent MJ use and risky decision-making in young adult college students using the IGT. To our knowledge, only one other study has examined risky decision making using the IGT in a similar and narrow age range of young adults . In the current study, MJ+ were older and had significantly lower IQ scores relative to HC. As both age and IQ were related to IGT performance, they were included as co-variates in the analyses. There was a significant main effect of group on net IGT scores, suggesting that MJ+ had lower net IGT scores relative to HC . Although MJ+ made advantageous card selections as indicated by the positive net IGT scores, they made less advantageous choices compared to HC. This effect is consistent with prior research examining group differences between MJ users and healthy controls in young adults . Research suggests that MJ users are more likely to make risky judgments despite subsequent monetary punishment than healthy controls and exhibit increased impulsive decision-making by selecting more disadvantageous cards than healthy controls . Additionally, the current findings support prior research that found young adult MJ users made more selections from disadvantageous decks A and B compared to healthy controls . However, in the current study, MJ+ also made fewer card selections than HC from deck C, an advantageous deck, but one that is associated with frequent punishments relative to deck D . This could suggest MJ users may prefer decks that are associated with frequent rewards and infrequent losses, which could drive reward-driven behavior. This observed performance difference in reward-driven behavior may be attributed to differences in utilization of the prefrontal cortex during strategy and choice selection.Furthermore, we found that the effect of group on net IGT scores was significant when including sex as a factor in the model. Overall, MJ + had lower net IGT scores compared with HC .