The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience

Winner of the Donald W. Light Award for the Applied or Public Practice of Medical Sociology

Medical marijuana laws have spread across the U.S. to all but a handful of states. Yet, eighty years of social stigma and federal prohibition creates dilemmas for patients who participate in state programs.

The Medicalization of Marijuana takes the first comprehensive look at how patients negotiate incomplete medicalization and what their experiences reveal about our relationship with this controversial plant as it is incorporated into biomedicine. Is cannabis used similarly to other medicines? Drawing on interviews with midlife patients in Colorado, a state at the forefront of medical cannabis implementation, this book explores the practical decisions individuals confront about medical use, including whether cannabis will work for them; the risks of registering in a state program; and how to handle questions of supply, dosage, and routines of use.

Individual stories capture how patients redefine and reclaim cannabis use as legitimate―individually and collectively―and grapple with an inherently political identity. These experiences help illustrate how stigma, prejudice, and social change operate.

By positioning cannabis use within sociological models of medical behavior, Newhart and Dolphin provide a wide-reaching, theoretically informed analysis of the issue that expands established concepts and provides new insight on medical cannabis and how state programs work.

The authors are a husband-and-wife team with more than thirty-five years collective experience writing on cannabis and drug policy topics, including contributions to more than two dozen books.

Michelle Newhart, Ph.D., teaches Sociology and works as an instructional designer at Mt. San Antonio College. Previously, she has taught at University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the co-author of Understanding Research Methods (10th ed.) from Routledge.

William Dolphin has taught English and Composition at San Francisco State University, Rhodes College, Azusa Pacific University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He currently teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Education at University of Redlands.