How can cannabis social world’s perspective inform public health interventions

Abstract This paper introduces the concept of social worlds of cannabis in order to capture users’ experience of boundary making against stigma or criminalisation of use. In order to problematize the normalization debate amid global, nonlinear liberalizing tendencies, it illuminates how cannabis users’ positionality in different conservative societies or legislations, but also their gender or social class interact with their construction of social worlds and their boundaries of “effective communication” around the use. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork in Poland and Turkey, as well as the recent literature, the paper argues that any form of prevention or public health intervention has to acknowledge cultural discrepancy between the users and nonusers.