April 10 - Dr. Lagalisse on "Marijuana Legalization as Frontier Capitalism" →

Marijuana Legalization as Frontier Capitalism

Erica Lagalisse
Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics

Moderated by Michael Polson
Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Economy and Natural Resource Economics and Cannabis Research Center affiliate

Wednesday, April 10 | 3:30-5pm
Social Science Matrix (820 Barrows Hall, 8th floor)

Please email Michael Polson - mpolson@berkeley.edu - to RSVP. Space is limited.

Sponsored by the Cannabis Research Center, UC Berkeley

Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, UC Berkeley/UCSF Program in Medical Anthropology

Erica Lagalisse’s ongoing multi-sited ethnographic research of both medical(ized) and black-market marijuana production, distribution and consumption suggests that the legalization of marijuana functions as a form of frontier capitalism.  Traditional producers are not granted rights to the marijuana strains and products they have developed; their appropriation by elites constitutes a form of primitive accumulation.  This process is facilitated by traditional producers being cast as “violent” while new white, wealthy, corporate marijuana entrepreneurs are described as “safe” through constructed associations with medicine, purity, and “healing”—constructions of “health” are always political, class-making devices, brought to inaugurate class rights and the respectability of some at the expense of others.

This event is free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible. 
For more information and to rsvp, please contact Michael Polson: mpolson@berkeley.edu.