Making the Medical Marijuana Market
Making the Medical Marijuana Market
How did entrepreneurs and activists establish medical marijuana markets in the United States despite more than a half-century of social stigma and state prohibition? In this chapter, I draw upon interviews with medical marijuana market pioneers to show how an exogenous shock and endogenous actors laid the foundation for a multi-billion dollar industry. Interviews suggest that the death and devastation of the AIDS epidemic compelled value-rational entrepreneurs to openly defy the law and build informal market institutions, such as organizational forms and rules of exchange, to supply marijuana to AIDS patients. Market proponents legitimized and legalized these informal institutions by deploying strategic frames portraying marijuana as a compassionate palliative for the dying and by passing ballot initiatives allowing medical marijuana use, first in San Francisco (1991) and then in California (1996).
Keywords: economic sociology, organizations, social movements, illegal markets, cannabis, marijuana, AIDS
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
