“I Ask Them to Remember”: Queering Economies and Ecologies of Value in Los Angeles' Shifting Cannabis Industry

Keywords: abolition, political ecology, racial capitalism, urban economies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 74

Abstract

Examining the development of the cannabis industry in Los Angeles from medical to "adult-use" into the last several years opens the door to questions about the true nature of value in the economy, and where real wealth lies. A lens of more than 5 years of in-depth ethnographic, economic and urban geography research offers the possibility value lies somewhere much closer to the ground, and can be far more expansive than material profit. This paper offers a queer lens on circuits of value that thrive off of deep relations of care and compassion by workers and communities affected by layers of racialized violence and trauma. Cultivators have fostered curious and complex relationships with the plant to support an expansive repertoire that of yet, no biotech could touch and belonging to a diverse and person-to-person network of seed exchange. Actors in cannabis understood value through a broader lens that included individual and collective experiential benefit and social transformation. The successive processes of commodification tied to legal regulation not only obscured, but also undermined such value-generation, fostering divides and ruthless competition, amplifying racialized inequalities and constructed divisions among communities, and entangling participants in complex financial and propertied wealth circuits. These were are also affected by a plethora of state, national and even global factors tied to Black, Latinx and other indigenous diasporas, to imperialism and militarization, and to other transnational flows. LA's massive upheavals offer key lessons for New York and other states currently shifting cannabis policy. [Edits forthcoming]