Commodifying Cannabis

Commodifying Cannabis is a sophisticated and welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on marijuana. Commodifying Cannabis examines the relationships that different cultures have developed with cannabis and “the consequences of the clash between these cultures” (p. xiv). Bradley J. Borougerdi describes his method of analysis as a “post-commodity” approach that does not place marijuana at the center of the discussion. Instead, he analyzes “the cultural legacy of commodities in societies by focusing on the cultural constructions around them” (p. xv). Borougerdi does an excellent job showing how dramatically the perception of cannabis changes over time. During the age of exploration, hemp was viewed as a vital “strategic commodity”; during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannabis was considered both a medicine and a dangerous intoxicant. The author uses the term Atlantic Orientalism to describe “perceptions of the Orient that traveled from the British Empire and Europe to the United States, developing into a complex fetish that both attracted and repulsed Westerners” (p. xiv). Borougerdi could have greatly expanded on this concept by including analysis of Southeast Asia's rich marijuana traditions. What made criminalizing or even stigmatizing the plant particularly hard in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos was that it was considered little more than a medicinal or cooking herb. Marijuana has been grown in these countries for centuries, and various preparations have been used to treat everything from migraine headaches to dysentery to providing pain relief after child birth. Not only was cannabis one of the region's most valuable exports during the late twentieth century, it fit neatly into an underground economy that existed in Southeast Asia for centuries, as Eric Taliacozzo explained in his book, Secret Trades, Porous Borders (2005

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