Structural foundations, triggering events, and facilitative contingency : the social origins of California’s Compassionate Use Act of 1996

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Currently in the United States there is a nationwide legislative movement to legalize marijuana for persons with certain diagnosable diseases. Despite representing a dramatic departure from the war on drugs approach which characterized 20th century American marijuana policy, the development of state-level medical cannabis laws has largely been ignored by criminologists and critical legal scholars. This dissertation aims to address this gap in the literature by examining the social origins of California’s Compassionate Use Act of 1996. California was the first state in the nation to legalize the medical use of marijuana when voters in that state approved Proposition 215 with 56% support. Using Galliher’s (2012) framework for understanding the structural foundations and triggering events associated with law formation, I constructed a dataset containing newspaper articles, voter pamphlets, legislative records, press releases and various secondary resources such as interview recordings and activist biographies. I ultimately argue that the categorial criteria used by the federal government to classify marijuana as a Schedule I narcotic under the Controlled Substances Act provided medical reform activists with the latitude necessary to challenge marijuana’s criminal status. The data suggests that the AIDS crisis during the late 1980s brought widespread attention to the potential therapeutic benefits of medical marijuana. Poorly timed police drug raids, an increasingly unpopular war on drugs, and San Francisco’s political legacy as a wide-open town helped to create a context where medical marijuana reform could find electoral success.