Pharmaceutical Inequalities

Navigating Cannabis Use in Legal and Illegal Contexts Across Continents: An Interview

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As part of our Pharmaceutical Inequalities series, Ejura Salihu interviews a 25-year-old Nigerian man, who now lives in the United States and uses cannabis, to understand his experiences of navigating the legal considerations of using cannabis in different geographical contexts.

From the Streets to the Kitchen: The Changing Face of Cannabis in the Media

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Figure 1: An ad for a film titled “Marihuana.” (National Library of Medicine)

The representation of cannabis (also known as marijuana, marihuana, pot, or weed) in the media has evolved over time. In the past, media coverage of cannabis primarily focused on its potential harms and association with criminal activity, pervasion, and addiction. From 1980 to the early 1990s, news stories about drug busts and the dangers of smoking cannabis dominated headlines, while print media, movies, and TV shows depicted cannabis users as dangerous. In popular culture, smoking cannabis was considered a forbidden ‘rite of passage’ spoken about in whispers. This type of coverage was the norm for several years and contributed to the low prevalence of cannabis use and the stigma and criminalization of cannabis users (as shown in Figure 1).

However, with the rise of medical marijuana legalization in the early 2010s, the media shifted its narrative. Journalists started reporting on the potential benefits of cannabis for treating various medical conditions, such as chronic pain, anxiety, and epilepsy. News stories featuring medical cannabis patients and their stories became common, and documentaries exploring the science behind cannabis and its medicinal properties gained popularity.

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A Snapshot of Drug Advertising Laws in the USA: Impact on Consumer Protection and Health

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Traditional drug advertisements involve drug ads and promotional material targeted at healthcare professionals to increase clinician knowledge of advancement in treatment options. On the other hand, direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) is pharmaceutical advertising directed at patients to increase their awareness of available drugs and treatment options.

There has been renewed interest in the value of DTCA in recent years, which makes it seem like a modern phenomenon, but the practice dates back to early medical training. The argument in support of DTCA is that targeting consumers instead of healthcare providers gives patients power and agency over their drug consumption (Schwartz & Woloshin, 2016). While this argument has some merits, it is vital that we know the history of drug advertisements in the United States to understand how DTCA has shaped public perception of drugs, drug use, and public health. Only with this understanding can we make a sound judgment on the need for DTCA in present times and the future of healthcare.

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Who Can Afford a Baby? An Intersection of Gender, Race, and Class Oppression in Fertility Treatment in the USA

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The World Health Organization (WHO) describes infertility as an inability to achieve a viable pregnancy within one year of regular and unprotected heterosexual sex. Infertility is classified as a disease by WHO and as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The Center for Disease Control estimates that 1 in 5 heterosexual women who have no prior births experience infertility. This makes infertility one of the most common diseases/disabilities in women of reproductive age (Insogna & Ginsburg, 2018; World Health Organization, 2018:2020; Davis & Khosla, 2020).

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Discussions on Enacting Transdisciplinarity in Psychedelic Studies 

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In my first post for this six-part series of commentaries, I reflected on the start of the “Psychedelic Pasts, Presents, and Futures” Borghesi-Mellon workshop when faculty, students, and community members gathered in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to discuss the importance of transdisciplinarity in psychedelic research and education. In this final post of the series, I return to transdisciplinarity after a semester of events, including a second discussion about transdisciplinarity on the other side of UW-Madison’s campus in the brutalist, concrete Helen C. White Hall. One of the aims of the organizers—Dr. Lucas Richert, Amanda Pratt, and myself–for this workshop was to foster conversations about what humanities and social sciences perspectives bring to psychedelic studies, particularly in relation to the role of transdisciplinarity at the new Transdisciplinary Center for Research on Psychoactive Substances (TCRPS) at UW-Madison.

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Future Histories of Psychedelic Biomedicine

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A commonly cited catalyst for the psychedelic renaissance is the renewed interest in biomedical research on psychedelics for mental health, including depression, PTSD, and addiction. For instance, popular media like Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (2018) and its Netflix adaptation (2022) often utilize this research to bolster claims about the relative safety of psychedelics and their efficacy as a mental health treatment. The common (and simplified) narrative in these popular portrayals is that psychedelic research boomed throughout the mid-twentieth century before being swept up in the drug war and pushed underground, and yet today, after years of unjust policies and propaganda, psychedelic researchers and advocates from the past are being proven right by contemporary biomedical research.

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Mosaics of Support for Psychedelic Risk Reduction

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Timothy Leary used the phrase “set and setting” to describe the way that one’s mindset and physical setting impacts their psychedelic experience. In a recent talk titled “Beyond Set and Setting: Cultivating Mosaics of Support,” Kwasi Adusei, DNP, PMHNP-BC, clarified that set and setting refer to the extra-pharmacological influences on psychedelic experiences, including the “color palette of set” (i.e. internal elements like mood, beliefs, and attitudes) and the “crucible of setting” (i.e external elements like music, space, and people). Adusei ultimately advocated for the addition of a “mosaic of support”–meaning the collection of factors that aid in integrating a psychedelic experience–to set and setting in order to increase the benefits and reduce the risks of psychedelics. 

Adusei came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to give this talk for the next installment of the “Psychedelic, Pasts, Presents and Futures” Borghesi-Mellon workshop. In his work as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist, and co-founder of the Psychedelic Society of Western New York, Adusei hopes to shift the stigma around psychedelics and demonstrate that psychedelics can help people heal and remain productive members of society. The aim of such work, in Adusei’s view, is to empower people to do this work within their own communities by providing numerous resources that support them in this project.

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