POLICY PHARMACOPEIA: an ethnography of anti-prohibitionism and the struggle for the liberation of marijuana in Colombia

Abstract

Abstract: This article presents the results of the ethnographic research developed with the cannabis movement of Colombia between the years 2013 and 2017. Firstly, it is shown how in that country, drug prohibition emerged as a sanitary, moral and economic arrangement to monopolize the production of medicines and poisons. It is argued that knowledge about the relationship between people and pharmakon, developed mainly by specialists in public security, political economy and psi  knowledge, systematically ignores the political agency of users and small drug producers. Secondly, searching the history of marijuana and its advocates, it describes the struggle to free the plant and get it back into the grounds of tolerated drunkenness, the medicine and industry.

Keywords: Pharmakon. Marijuana. Prohibitionism.