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Despite growing evidence to the contrary, researchers continue to posit causal links between cannabis, crime, psychosis, and violence. These spurious connections are rooted in history and fueled decades of structural limitations that shaped how researchers studied cannabis. Until recently, research in this area was explicitly funded to link cannabis use and harm and ignore any potential benefits. Post-prohibition cannabis research has failed to replicate the dire findings of the past. This article outlines how the history of controlling cannabis research has led to various harms, injustices, and ethical complications. We compare commonly cited research from both the prohibition and post-prohibition eras and argue that many popular claims about the dangers of cannabis are the result of ethical lapses by researchers, journals, and funders. We propose researchers in this area adopt a duty of care in cannabis research going forward. This would oblige individual researchers to establish robust research designs, employ careful analytic strategies, and acknowledge limitations in more detail. This duty involves the institutional recognition by funders, journals, and others that cannabis research has been deliberately misconstrued to criminalize, stigmatize, and pathologize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cannabis liberalization is a fascinating case study in moral-legal re-negotiation. From broad international examples of decriminalization to specific local legalization models, numerous criminological questions are emerging. This paper describes three significant challenges for cannabis liberalization. These include persistent inequalities associated with policing cannabis, the invisibility of coercive care and control within diversion, and the hazards associated with illusory policy reform. We present Cannabis Criminology as a multidisciplinary effort to understand the prohibition, decriminalization, legalization, and nascent regulation of cannabis in ways that acknowledge but transcend law-based paradigms. Consistent with criminology's multiple and sometimes contradictory dimensions, we outline five thematic areas that can inform the study of cannabis. These include law, society, and social control, police and policing cannabis, race, ethnicity and intrusion, the economics of cannabis use, and cannabis and criminal behavior. Finally, we conclude that privileging the views of people who use cannabis can provoke more inclusive, participatory, and otherwise imaginative efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While efforts to restrict the use of cannabis are more than a century old, policy liberalization is more recent. History suggests that the growing tolerance for cannabis will continue to be met with opposition. Cannabis policy has been trapped in a recurrent rotation from acceptance and increased use to hostility and expansive efforts to control those who consume it. This paper considers how historical criminology can uncover criminological artifacts to conceive, frame, and clarify cannabis criminalization, decriminalization, and liberalization. As a subject, cannabis was shaped by forces that had little to do with the plant itself, which led it to be socially constructed as evil, dangerous, or otherwise risky. We consider the history of cannabis through the lenses of race, addiction, and research and explore reports from five different countries on cannabis and criminal justice policy. • Outlines unique historical approach to the field of criminology. • Examines primary sources for key themes: race; addiction; research. • Links older reports with more recent history of cannabis policy. • Considers international dimension of cannabis prohibition as historical case study. • Outlines how this method might inform other historical examinations in criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]