Editor’s Note: Special bonus post this week! Please see below for a call for papers for a very exciting conference that’s being held in April 2020. Contact information below.
Denver, CO
April 6-10, 2020
Panel: Cannabis Geographies
Since the 1990s, the international drug-control regime has eroded because many societies have decided that drug prohibitions produce more problems than benefits. Cannabis has been a prominent focus of drug-policy reforms, which has also enabled expanded production of cannabis for non-drug purposes such as fiber and oilseeds. Many jurisdictions in Europe, North America, South America, and Africa have decriminalized and/or legalized some instances of cannabis production, sales, possession, and use.
The emergence of legal, open markets—such as AAG attendees will see in Denver—and the simultaneous persistence of black markets has had complex geographic effects. Yet geographic studies of the plant are surprisingly sparse, and broader knowledge of the plant has been distorted by twentieth-century war-on-drugs politics. This paper session will gather current geographical research on cannabis—used for marijuana, hemp, or other products—in order to survey a field of study that has expanded rapidly in the past five years. We seek contributions from all fields within geography, including economic, agricultural, environmental, health, legal, political, historical, and human geographies.
Please send abstracts to Chris Duvall (duvall@unm.edu) by October 15, 2019.
Representative recent literature includes:
Aggarwal (2018) Cannabis fear deconditioning: An autobiological marijuana memoir of a South Asian-Oklahoman physician-scientist. Journal of Ethnobiology 38(4): 489-503.
Butsic & Brenner. (2016) Cannabis (Cannabis sativa or C. indica) agriculture and the environment: a systematic, spatially-explicit survey and potential impacts. Environmental Research Letters 11(4): 044023.
Corva (2014) Requiem for a CAMP: The life and death of a domestic U.S. drug war institution. International Journal of Drug Policy 25(1): 71-80.
Duvall (2019) The African Roots of Marijuana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chouvy, ed. (2019) Illegal Cannabis Cultivation in the World. Special issue: EchoGéo 48 (April).
Gianotti et al. (2017) The quasi-legal challenge: assessing and governing the environmental impacts of cannabis cultivation in the North Coastal Basin of California. Land Use Policy 61: 126-134.
Johnson (2017) Grass Roots: A History of Cannabis in the American West. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.
Keul & Eisenhauer. (2019) Making the high country: Cannabis tourism in Colorado, USA. Annals of Leisure Research 22(2): 140-160.
Long et al. (2017) Cannabis in Eurasia: Origin of human use and Bronze Age trans-continental connections. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 26(2): 245-258.
Morrison et al. (2014) The economic geography of medical cannabis dispensaries in California. International Journal of Drug Policy 25(3): 508-515.
Williams & Warf, eds. (2016) Drugs, Law, People, Place and the State: Ongoing regulation, resistance and change. Special issue:Space & Polity 20(1).
Wang (2016) Crowdsourcing the landscape of cannabis (marijuana) of the contiguous United States. Environment and Planning A 48(8): 1449-1451.
Warf (2014) High points: An historical geography of cannabis.Geographical Review 104(4): 414-438.
Zakrzewski et al. (2019) Cannabis in the capital: Exploring the spatial association between medical marijuana dispensaries and crime. Journal of Crime and Justice pre-print: 1-15.