by Dominic Corva, Executive Director
Simple concepts are pretty good for marketing, branding, and advertising, but they aren’t much help for engaging with complex problems. In today’s post, I want to explain the concept of “cultural economy” so we can engage with the possibility that cannabis markets and policy might be shaped towards social peace, not just selling products.
If your central concern is how to maximize revenue, then this post might not be very useful for you. The audience to whom I write desires a more peaceful world and is willing to give up a little bit of short-term material gain to make that possible.
Markets and Society
What do we mean when we say that we live in a capitalist society? It depends on who is answering, but perhaps an uncontroversial starting point might be that a capitalist society creates and allocates social opportunities predominantly through the movement of money value. Money capital, or exchange value as political economists might say, provides a universal means for particular individual or social ends to be realized. No home? If you have money, no problem.
Of course, if you have a healthy social ecology, you may not need money to at least be housed. You might be able to rely on a family member or friend to sleep out of the elements. The people who can house you in such circumstances aren’t rewarded by money, but perhaps by love or compassion. Love and compassion are cultural values — they mean something different in different places, but nonetheless are important strands in the webs of meaning that hold societies together.
This example helps us understand that we don’t live in a society that is exclusively shaped by capitalism, even if capitalism is the primary means through which housing happens.
In fact, social relations are determined by many, many other values besides money. Friendships, for example, aren’t (hopefully) relationships that one buys and sells. Certainly, it is much more rare to purchase one’s parents, children, lovers, and communities, than not.
Thus we can understand that living in a capitalist society does not mean our society exclusively depends on the movement of capital. Many entrepreneurs in society, in fact, get off the ground and even thrive by incorporating “more-than-capitalist” values into their business plans.
This is most obvious with businesses that cater to “ethical consumers”: people who pay more for products that are associated with fairness and sustainability. “Fair trade,” “non-GMO,” and “organic” products line the shelves of our grocery stores, and of course corporations like Patagonia and Whole Foods exist on the range of more-than-capitalist business plans.
Where does the legal cannabis industry fit, is the question at hand. Are there “more than capitalist” values that cannabis entrepreneurs desire to accompany the flow of capital?
Cannabis Cultural Economy
In the U.S., cannabis culture comes from the 1960s, associated with two very particular forms of social movement: counterculture and the antiwar left.
Counterculture was not necessarily a “left” meaning system, although the overlap was pretty strong and certainly well-advertised. The hippie phenomenon was fairly libertarian and rejected centralized solutions to social problems. It had a well-developed critique of the State as a culturally conservative institution, aimed at preserving cultural values that made a lot less sense in the context of the “square” industrial capitalist economy. Rejecting social norms didn’t lead to a different set of central values: it opened up space for individual freedoms that ranged the gamut from free love to the pursuit of self-interest untethered from social obligation.
The antiwar left wasn’t monolithic either. It may be a reach to even attach the “left” to “antiwar” because plenty of cultural conservatives weren’t too keen on the draft nor the Vietnam war. It’s even an open question whether it was the hippies or the soldiers that really brought cannabis consumption into Western culture, given the extent to which Vietnam soldiers and vets adopted cannabis use as way to cope with existing in the middle of a war that didn’t make sense as well as the trauma of living through it and coming home — yes, often with suitcases of hash and opium for entrepreneurial reasons. The hills of Southern Humboldt were full of veterans that found they couldn’t manage their PTSD by re-entering normal society, as well as veterans of student organizing and Haight-Ashbury that sought to go “back to the land” and live a sort of pre-industrial existence in communes and on cheap land available after the postwar timer economy went bust.
The existence of a cultural market for cannabis led, eventually, to the commercialization of that market when the U.S. government got the Mexican government to use Paraquat to eradicate the fields supplying urban veterans of the counterculture and foreign wars. Suddenly, California’s sinsemilla growers found that they had a cash crop in their food gardens, and the wholesale price per pound in the late 1970s shot up to about $11,000/pound adjusted to 2011 prices, the last time I made that calculation for a journal article.
That’s when the modern cannabis cultural economy was mixed, when producing cannabis for profit slid in — fairly easily — with the rural spaces inhabited by the remnants of the counterculture that were already hybridizing with rural values and people. Rural libertarianism and countercultural values teamed up to object to the Federal government as an invading force, helicopters and all.
This was an alliance that protected cannabis production and consumption for everyone, not just hippies, vets, and people that rejected the characterization of cannabis as a threat to society. In particular, it protected and nurtured commercial values as important to the central value of the cannabis cultural economy: overgrowing the government.
Cannabis, Values, Capitalism
And it won, sort of. The wave of legislation behind the creation of regulated cannabis markets has certainly crippled the prospects of total cannabis prohibition around the world. But we are facing a split that was really there all along, between the value of those for whom cannabis markets are an end to themselves; and the value of cannabis markets as a means for creating a more just and peaceful world. These values are not inherently left nor right.
Libertarian entrepreneurialism has a problem with over-regulation that constructs new barriers between the cannabis haves and have-nots, for different reasons than the progressive peaceniks. Similarly, corporate cannabis interests support artificial, non-market-derived barriers to protect their returns on investment, while progressive liberals support regulations to protect consumers and non-cannabis culture stakeholders whose support was necessary to accomplish legalization-with-prohibition.
This is the great difference dividing the cannabis cultural economy today. In one direction, “normalized” cannabis markets that pursue profit and tax revenues for their own sake. And in the other, “normalized” cannabis markets for erasing stigma and including communities affected by the drug war in the imagined peace dividend.
The realist in me says that regulated cannabis markets are likely to be dominated by the former value, exchange value, rather than other values like compassion and restorative justice. But the mission of CASP is to make space for more-than-capitalist values to live on and perhaps thrive, through compassionate industry practices, post-prohibition policy education, and socially oriented academic research agendas. There may be no end to this struggle, but it’s worth struggling for in the interest of social peace. The cultural economy of cannabis is evolving, and we are too.
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