Correr atrás

In recent years, the therapeutic-medicinal use of marijuana has generated new tensions around the plant’s usage, mobilizing patients, families, healthcare professionals, and activists around demands for access. This article analyzes, through ethnography research, the strategies employed by my interlocutors in their quest for legal access to marijuana in Brazil and Argentina. The research was conducted through fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews with these actors and cannabis associations. I also adopt the native category correr atrás (“to run after”) as an analytical tool to describe practices driven by the urgency of access and the confrontation with bureaucratic and legal barriers. In Brazil, I examine the case of Jair to highlight how his correr atrás unfolds through the search for information, medical professionals, and the realization of access through judicialization—initially by demanding that the State cover the cost of importing marijuana, and subsequently through a Habeas Corpus petition to authorize cultivation. In Argentina, through my dialogue with Olívia and Agustina, I explore how the articulation between civil society and state bureaucracies contributed to build a broader regulation that allows legal forms of cultivation, production, and access to cannabis for therapeutic-medicinal purposes. I conclude that the different forms and paths to access marijuana are not merely reflections of distinct regulatory frameworks, but are shaped by the particular ways people run after such access in each context

Articulation (sociology · Bureaucracy · Civil society · Ethnography · Participant observation · State (computer science · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Religion and Society in Latin America · Youth, Drugs, and Violence