Living with Prohibition: Regular Cannabis Users, Legal Sanctions, and Informal Controls

Abstract

Adult cannabis users have received much less attention from researchers than their youthful counterparts. Yet significant proportions of adults persist in cannabis use, disregard drug laws, and fulfill otherwise conventional adult roles. This paper addresses the questions of how older, regular users learn to live with these apparent contradictions, how they are influenced by legal sanctions and informal controls, and why they have not (as prophesied in the early 1970s) become an active force for drug law reform.