Canada's legal cannabis consumer: fifty years of cultivating the rational-utilitarian subject

James Cosgrave and Patricia Cormack

Chapter 40 in Research Handbook on the Sociology of Consumption, 2026, pp 466-475 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter examines official governmental framing of drug consumers in Canada in the 50-year period preceding the legalization of cannabis. Using a genealogical analysis of landmark government reports leading up to and including the 2018 Cannabis Act, it finds that official discursive formulations of the drug user move from overtly moral discourse to rational-utilitarian ones. Through what it characterizes as a “rationalization of morality”, notions like vice and the prohibitionist state begin to be replaced by scientific and health discourses; but a moral discourse nevertheless persists, constructed around good and bad consumption practices, habits, and attitudes. Being “informed” about the consequences of drug use becomes an obligation of the citizen who puts faith in scientific and expert pronouncements. Ultimately, the new licit Canadian cannabis citizen-consumer has been discursively shaped to eschew the legacy market as dangerous and support the regulated market designed to drive it out of existence.

Keywords: Drugs; Consumption; Cannabis; Regulation; Policy; Canada (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035310500
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