It’s (Not) Just a Plant: Landscapes of Legalized Cannabis in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley

Abstract

Legalization of cannabis has accelerated over the past decade, with more than a dozen U.S. states legalizing adult-use or “recreational” cannabis, dozens more permitting medical use, and varieties low in THC (“hemp”) legal nation-wide. However, legalization does not mean the end of prohibition but the refashioning and renegotiatin of boundaries between legal and illegal versions of the plant, which circulates in a variety of markets with different rules and dynamics. For the “Emerald Triangle” region of northern California and southern Oregon that has been the epicenter of U.S. cannabis production for several decades, each successive moment of legalization – medical, recreational, and hemp – has been accompanied by new waves of “green rush,” cycles of boom and bust that have transformed the landscape.This dissertation focuses on southern Oregon’s Rogue River Valley, a long-standing cannabis producing region that has seen several successive shifts in the scale and geography of production with each phase of the roll-out of legalization. In this context, this dissertation asks, how is cannabis being re-defined, by whom, and to what ends? How do these new layers of meaning reshape the forms and practices of cannabis production? Based on interviews and site visits with growers across the spectrum of legal regimes, participant observation in cannabis industry events, and autoethnographic fieldwork as a worker in the harvest, this dissertation presents a portrait of the region’s cannabis landscapes in five movements. First, it considers the emergence of the recreational marijuana market and its booms and bust. Using the concepts of moral economy/economic morality, I examine how the ideal of the “free market” has influenced the development of Oregon’s legalized cannabis policy, and how ideas of what is fair and unfair shape the way growers perceive this market and their place in it. The next chapter looks at the emergence of legalized hemp, pointing out that “medicinal hemp” re-defines the meaning of hemp and situating this crop’s emergence as partially a response to the failure of the recreational marijuana market. Following this, the next chapter continues by examining the re-framing of cannabis consumption as wellness practice alongside the emergence of medicinal hemp and CBD as a wellness fad. Drawing on the discourse of hemp advocates, I show how individual wellness through consumption and global and regional well-being through production are said to be linked. In contrast with this discourse, I consider unsustainable practices that have accompanied the hemp boom in the Rogue Valley. Next, I use an agrarian studies lens to explore the “industrialization” of cannabis, using data collected as a worker in the medicinal hemp harvest. Drawing on work both harvesting in the field and processing harvested cannabis in a warehouse setting, I show how the transformation of this plant into a commodity is a contradictory process that is never fully resolved. The final chapter uses the concept of “food from nowhere/food from somewhere,” applying this notion to weed to ask if and how place matters. With processes of substitution through chemical and biochemical means becoming increasingly prevalent, replacing the plant altogether is increasingly possible. At the same time, newly forming legalized international cannabis commodity chains may undermine the position of producers in places like Oregon and California. In response, they are organizing efforts to link product quality to place names and establish price premiums for this terroir. In conversation with a critical history of the plant’s appropriation from the global South, this chapter critiques these efforts while also observing that they constitute a novel effort to assert the value of place in the governance of U.S. agriculture.