Episode
Ground Level: Cannabis and the State w/ Adam Lloyd, Gulzat Botoeva and Matt Bishop
- Podcast
- SPERI Presents...
- Published
- Mar 19, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3086
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Summary
Drugs, alcohol, and other recreational substances are central to everyday social life and form a significant, contested and repressed sector of the global economy. Importantly, it is a market that states seek to disband or regulate through domestic and international political institutions. Through their encounter with state institutions, substances become a central political issue at all levels of policymaking: from youth policy to the fight against organised crime, from local neighbourhood councils to international security forums, from small artisanal production to global agricultural supply chains. In this episode, we focus specifically on the political economy of grassroots cannabis production and its interaction with the state to understand how morality, values, and (il)legality shape the political economy of recreational substances. Concepts discussed: state, legality, illegality, regulation, moral political economy, racial capitalism. Host: Dr Frank Maracchione , SOAS University of London. Guests: Adam Lloyd is a postgraduate researcher in Politics at University of Sheffield, focusing on the political economy of cannabis legalisation in North America, exploring the broader socio-economic and policy implications of cannabis reform. Dr Gulzat Botoeva is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Swansea University. She investigates illegal economic activities ranging from drug trafficking in Central Asia to illegal gold mining and small-scale hashish harvesting in Kyrgyzstan. Dr Matthew Bishop is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the political economy of development, with particular attention to small states and peripheral economies, and the political economy of drug policy in t…