The Banana Peel Project

Last week I wrote about a recent legal action by the medical marijuana advocacy organization Americans for Safe Access (ASA), who claims that the official federal position on medical marijuana relies on outdated and altogether false scientific facts about the dangers and efficacy of marijuana for medical use.  Again, let’s take a look at the statement by ASA Executive Director Steph Sherer:

The science to support medical marijuana is overwhelming.  It’s time for the federal government to acknowledge the efficacy of medical marijuana and stop holding science hostage to politics.

What’s clear to me is that organizations working at the intersection of patients’ rights and drug policy reform are helping to renegotiate the terms of the relationship between science and the liberal-democratic state.  If we’re going to understand how that relationship is being changed, we have to understand how science and the state got together in the first place.

In the past, it was through science that the state was able to construct a domain of Truth, a realm of objective knowledge about nature to which it could refer in order to justify its representational claims.  During the 19th and 20th centuries Western liberal governments (especially in the United States) developed a variety of practical and discursive strategies for constructing this domain of truth, strategies which depended on particular understandings of the role of knowledge (Truth) in reconciling individual autonomy and political agency.

It is exactly this idea of truth that is being renegotiated here.  Domains of truth are those realms of objects and actions that exist outside and prior to “politics” and which serve to legitimize any number of political actions that are deemed problematic or questionable–such as the refusal to explore new avenues of research into possibly useful drugs.

But it’s also clear that by instrumentalizing science in this way–by reducing science to a means to a moral and political end–the state has made itself vulnerable to accusations by groups like ASA that it pays no attention to the actual content of science.  Has science, that oh-so-valued domain of truth that has historically been oh-so-necessary for the expansion of liberalism, outgrown its role as a guarantor of political order?

Sure, ASA has appealed to the state, and in that way we could understand the legal appeal as the victory, rather than the beginning of the defeat, of liberalism.  But science–especially medical marijuana research–is increasingly seen to be outside the province of the state, and is being marshalled in support of new kinds of claims and new ways of thinking.

The time may be approaching in which scientific knowledge claims are no longer made by powerful elites but rather by local, identity-based communities of patients and activists who use science as a new kind of truth discourse.  What will happen to the liberal state as we know it when it runs out of the resources on which it has based its legitimacy?  Will it turn to other strategies to support the legitimacy of its representational forms, or will liberal democracy itself be transformed, giving rise to new forms of representation and accountability?