(WITHDRAWN) The Social Construction of Cannabis Is Social Work

Background and Purpose: The objective of this paper is to chart the construction of cannabis in social work scholarship across the last half century. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes that the social work profession must actively revise its research, education and practice approach to the use of cannabis.

• Methods: This paper is based on a systematic review of all empirical articles that refer to cannabis published in 15 key social work journals between 1970 to 2018. The systematic searches resulted in a combined set of 510 articles, of which 245 matched the inclusion criteria for this study. A content and thematic analysis of the corpus identified three categories.
• Results: The first category, which includes the overwhelming majority of the articles (84.5%), presents the dominant construction of cannabis in social work – cannabis as a dangerous drug, undifferentiated from other drugs. As such cannabis use is constructed as inherently destructive, and as reflecting a deficit in users' personality or psychological functioning. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the dominant construction of cannabis has remained static across fifty years. The second category, which includes 12.5% of the corpus, presents different aspects of the harm reduction approach. This approach rejects the dominant construction as unhelpful and even harmful, because it dehumanizes cannabis users, intensifies social inequity, and obscures important questions. This approach differentiates between use and abuse, and between cannabis and other 'hard' drugs. Furthermore, this approach highlights social inequality as an important component of any consideration of social work policy and practice with regards to cannabis use. The third category, which includes less than 3% of the corpus, presents a unique perspective on cannabis – focusing on the perspective of people who use cannabis, and on the construction of cannabis use in therapeutic terms.
• Conclusions and Implications: The evolving body of knowledge about cannabis, in other research areas, highlights the need for a new social construction of cannabis in social work scholarship. Rather than defining cannabis use as negative or positive, and dichotomising between recreational and medical use, more research is needed on the experiences and perceptions of users, their families, and their social workers. There is a need to better understand the ways in which cannabis use is conceptualised by users: its psychological, physical, mental, and spiritual effect, and the ways in which they negotiate the health, social, and legal implications of their use. Second, more research is needed about social workers in this context; their practice and perception in relation to cannabis at the present time, when its legal status in many countries is changing, and new medical understandings are emerging. Finally, introducing an ecological system view to the issue of cannabis use is especially important. There is a need to explore the complex set of reciprocal interactions between cannabis and a whole set of factors, including mental and physical health, gender, socio-economic status, family status, legal status, so as to form a clearer picture of the specific influence of cannabis in users’ lives.