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
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