Everyday life with cannabis - about the moral frames among recreational cannabis users

August 27th 2012

Everyday life with cannabis - about the moral frames among recreational cannabis users

Anne-Sofie Christensen, Vibeke Asmussen Frank and Helle Vibeke Dahl

Nordic Alcohol and Drug Researchers’ AssemblyCopenhagen, Denmark. August 27th – 29th 2012

Anne-Sofie Christensen, Vibeke Asmussen Frank, Helle Vibeke Dahl

Centre for Drug and Alcohol Research, Aarhus University, August 27th

2012

Methodology• Internet survey with 560 cannabis growers (2008)

•42 qualitative interviews with respondents from survey (2008-10): 7 women and 35 men between 18 and 75

• In this presentation, we only use draw on interviews with informants older than 25 years

•All were growing from a few plants in the windowsill to 10-20 plants in the back yard; a few informants had up to 50-100 plants.

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Four questions1) In which situations do the informants use cannabis in their everyday life;

2) what are their explanations and the purposes for their consumption,

3) how do they encompass the cannabis into their everyday lives, and on the contrary

4) in which situations do the informants not use cannabis – and why?

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Moral frames for not smoking cannabis

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MF1: Children Interviewer: Do you smoke while you are with the children?Well, sometimes I smoke after they are off to bed around midnight. But I don’t when I’m with them physically or play with them or something

Interviewer: Why don’t you smoke? To me it would be the same as being drunk while being with children, I do not think is right.

Interviewer: Do you mind if they know that you smoke? I don’t see any reason why they should know. [...] There is no reason that they get the ideas at such a young age.

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MF2: Work

…When I go to work and things like that, I will not risk that some of my colleagues or others gets beaten up because I am not alert. I will rather hurt while I'm at work [he smokes to ease pain]. As a guard, it's just not very good a good idea [...] And when you're done working, you can just walk 500 meters and then you can pull one [a joint] out of your pocket. I think that even if it was legal then I would not do it while working. It's like you do not drink when you are at work, it's basically something wrong .

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MF3: Traffics

... And I don’t smoke if I’m going driving, I have no car now but I have a motorcycle, which I ride every day, but it's not that I smoke and go driving. I go where I have to go and then smoke.

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MF4: Travel and holidays • ’Well I just had 20 days where I was in the [far-east]. I had a job outthere [...]I would certainly not want go to jail for many years out there. So I didn’t bring any cannabis with me and I did fine, I had no problems’.

•When traveling in certain social settings i.e. with whom they do not like to smoke.

•When the need for smoking disappears or diminishes.

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MF5: Family - and social events

... Just to take an example before I go to family dinner or just before I arrangements, I don’t smoke. I don’t want to walk around being high [...] I didn’t smoke a joint before coming here today; I wanted to be clear in your head, so I didn’t smoke [...] if I come home from work and light a joint and then my mom calls to say that we're going to dinner in 4 hours at grandmother’s, I'll just have to wait two hours and see how I feel and if I still feel unbalanced so I call and cancel and if I do not think I'm terribly high, I'll just go.

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August 27th 2012

Thank you !

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Everyday life with cannabis - about the moral frames among recreational cannabis users