Presentation: The plurality of marijuana and the anthropological approach to the topic in Latin America

Abstract

This dossier brings together contributions that analyze, from a social science perspective, the transactions and controversies surrounding marijuana in Brazil and Argentina, understanding it as a public problem marked by moral, legal, scientific, and political disputes. The articles explore the processes of regulating therapeutic and medicinal use, the forms of mobilization of users, family members, and activists, and the ways in which different actors and bureaucracies—that have specific practices and knowledge—produce and negotiate boundaries between the licit and the illicit. The dossier shows that recent advances in the recognition of the medicinal use of marijuana do not mean the overcoming of the prohibitionist paradigm, but rather its reconfiguration, generating new hierarchies of legitimacy, inequalities of access, and institutional tensions. By articulating macro and micro scales of analysis, the collected works contribute to the understanding of the contemporary dynamics of drug policies in Latin America and reaffirm the centrality of the social sciences, and anthropology in particular, to the study of public controversies, state bureaucracies, and disputes over recognition and rights. Thus, while advancing reflections on drug policies, this dossier also proposes an examination of marijuana as a public problem of particular relevance to anthropology, insofar as it provides a privileged analytical vantage point from which to observe the functioning of state bureaucracies, the situated production of legality, moral disputes surrounding health and crime, and the constitution of specific modes of political practice, whose implications extend well beyond the domain of drug policies.