Full Description
Since the late 1990s, marijuana grow operations have been identified by media and others as a new and dangerous criminal activity of "epidemic" proportions. With Killer Weed, Susan C. Boyd and Connie Carter use their analysis of fifteen years of newspaper coverage to show how consensus about the dangerous people and practices associated with marijuana cultivation was created and disseminated by numerous spokespeople including police, RCMP, and the media in Canada. The authors focus on the context of media reports in Canada to show how claims about marijuana cultivation have intensified the perception that this activity poses "significant" dangers to public safety and thus is an appropriate target for Canada's war on drugs.
Boyd and Carter carefully show how the media draw on the same spokespeople to tell the same story again and again, and how a limited number of messages has led to an expanding anti-drug campaign that uses not only police, but BC Hydro and local municipalities to crack down on drug production. Going beyond the newspapers, Killer Weed examines how legal, political, and civil initiatives that have emerged from the media narrative have troubling consequences for a shrinking Canadian civil society.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Marijuana Grow Ops: Setting the Scene
Chapter One: A Brief Socio-History of Drug Scares, Racialization, Nation Building, and Policy
Chapter Two: Problematizing Marijuana Grow Ops: Mayerthorpe and Beyond
Chapter Three: Marijuana Grow Ops and Organized Crime
Chapter Four: Racialization of Marijuana Grow Ops
Chapter Five: Civil Responses to Marijuana Grow Ops
Chapter Six: Using Children to Promote Increased Regulation: The Representation and Regulation of Children and Parents Found at Grow Ops
Chapter Seven: Alternative Perspectives
Appendix
Newspaper References
References
Notes
