New Publication in Society and Space on Calaveras, Exurbia, Cannabis Prohibition, and Patient Activism

Just published online: Buttressed and Breached: The Exurban Fortress, Cannabis Activism and the Drug War’s Shifting Political Geography. It is published in Environment & Planning D: Society & Space. I have been working on this in one form or another for several years and it develops from my fieldwork in Calaveras County, California. In it, I grapple with how the political regime made possible by cannabis prohibition relates to the broader movement of capital, people and ideas that transformed rural Calaveras into exurbia, which is (reductively) a term for the places beyond suburbia that have sub/urban amenities but a rural character. In short, cannabis criminalization made possible a way of imagining “the rural” that was synonymous with “security” from urban degeneracy. Cannabis was a focal point in how to secure this rural/urban line and, in doing so, ensure the ongoing exurbanization of Calaveras, a project that was continuously opposed by environmentalists and even exurbanites themselves. If the link above doesn’t have a PDF, feel free to peruse this pre-publication version.