Is cannabis use normalized, celebrated or neutralized? Analysing talk as action

Abstract

In qualitative interviews with 100 cannabis users in Norway, three discursive repertoires were particularly frequent. The first emphasized how users were ‘normal’ with statements, such as ‘everyone smokes cannabis’ or ‘cannabis users are not different from others’. The second discursive repertoire emphasized the fascinating difference of both users and the drug. Many cannabis users, stated that cannabis was used by ‘free-thinking, open people’ and triggered creativity. The third discursive repertoire was different techniques of risk denial, arguing that cannabis ‘is just a plant’ or that cannabis use did not have any harmful consequences. These three discursive repertoires are the empirical foundations for three conflicting theoretical traditions in studies of illegal drugs. Cannabis has been described as ‘normalized’, interpreted in a subcultural framework, or researchers have emphasized how illegal drug use is neutralized by users. The interdiscursivity of Norwegian cannabis users challenge all three theoretical frameworks and can only be understood by analysing talk as action. This article argues that all three discursive repertoires can be understood as responses to stigmatization. The conclusion is that the theoretical framework of ‘normalization’ is not the best way to understand cannabis use in Norway and possibly elsewhere.

• Cannabis
• neutralization
• normalization
• risk denial
• qualitative method
• narrative criminology

Notes

1. With an exception for drug users devoted to an ‘addict’ identity, for example, many of those who have been in treatment.

2. The debate in the UK, for example, about the classification of cannabis as either a class B or C drug, is as much about the shared social understanding of the drug, as it is about the actual effects of it.

3. Most interviews were conducted by the author and a co-researcher, but two research assistants, and two master students also participated. Data were collected across Norway.

4. Cannabis is mostly used in the form of hashish in Scandinavia, not marijuana.

5. For example, in the pages of transcribed interviews, the codes for normalization discourse only account for one-sixth of the risk denial and neutralization techniques identified in these data.

6. Järvinen and Demant (2011) make the same observation in Denmark. But in the same way as normalization theorists (Aldridge et al., 2011, pp. 219–221, 227), and somehow surprisingly, they do not consider it to counter their argument of normalization.