ABSTRACT
Cannabis legalization was an unpopular idea in the United States for most of the last century. Over the last two decades, support for legalization skyrocketed, favored by a majority for the first time in 2013 and by two-thirds of those polled in 2018. Rising public favorability toward cannabis, alongside a wave of state legalizations, fuels the popular narrative that weed is being destigmatized, allowing consumers to “come out of the closet”. This chapter investigates how race and gender are depicted in campaigns to legalize cannabis, through a qualitative content analysis of the Yes on 19 and Yes on 64 campaigns for adult-use cannabis legalization in California. It argues that depictions of class-privileged white women enjoying cannabis for its recreational and medicinal properties served to launder and legitimize the image of the industry by severing connections to the stoner as a stigmatic identity.
