Cannabis
Paper: Visualising legitimacy: An analysis of medicinal cannabis images in Australian news | Cannabis Law Report
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This paper examines how photographs in Australia’s online news media contribute to the framing of medicinal cannabis (MC) in the period 2014 to 2021. This was a particularly complicated period in the drug’s history in Australia. In 2016 the Australian government passed legislation enabling a range of cannabis products to be prescribed by doctors. However, cannabis remained an ‘unapproved’ therapeutic good with the nation’s pharmacological regulatory authority, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), stating there is ‘limited evidence’ of its effectiveness for use in different medical conditions (Australian Government, 2018). Since the legislative change, patients’ access to MC has been circumscribed by a range of factors including the complex prescription requirements, the cost of the drug, laws which disallow driving while taking the drug, and inadequate General Practitioner (GP) knowledge to prescribe it (Bawa et al., 2022; O’Brien, 2019). Nevertheless, while it continues to be common for Australians to access MC illegally, since 2018–2019 there has been an increase in prescriptions for the drug (Bawa et al., 2022).1
To date, with a few exceptions (Keul and Eisenhauer, 2019; Morrison et al., 2014) there has been limited spatial scholarship on MC. Despite this gap, geographical studies on drugs more broadly are useful in highlighting how meanings attached to MC, like all drugs, are geographically fluid and often contested, as well as entangled in social, cultural and political contexts and discourses of morality (Wilton and Moreno, 2012; Williams and Warf, 2016). Through a detailed geographic history of cannabis from its earliest uses in premodern times to the contemporary period, Warf (2014) demonstrates the veracity of this claim. His conclusion that ‘there is not one, single meaning to cannabis, but a multiplicity of meanings that arise from, and contribute to, local relations of power and ideology’ (Warf, 2014, p.434) provides the entry point for our paper. That is, to ask what meanings about MC were conveyed in photographs in online news stories about the drug in the period 2014–2021 and to understand the implications of these meanings. We take a framing approach to our focus on images, as they have been overlooked in the literature on the mediatisation of MC, even though today media culture is highly visual (Thomson et al., 2023), and researchers are continuing to demonstrate the power of images in communicating ideologies of health and wellbeing (Harvey and Brookes, 2019; Brookes et al., 2021).
The paper is divided into six parts. We begin with introducing our theoretical framework of news framing, followed by a review of literature which considers place in media representations of MC. We then outline our methodological framework and explore our findings through two main representations: People and Place and Plant and Place. Images of People and Place legitimised MC by demarcating the boundary between medicinal and recreational cannabis, through visual signifiers of insiders to society (Morris, 2023) and suburban Australia. Images of Plant and Place also included a storyline of legitimisation through placing cannabis in medical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural settings, however, there was a disparate photographic storyline blurring the boundaries between cannabis as a medicine and recreational drug.
1.1. Framing as a theoretical framework
Drawing on the sociological theorising of Erving Goffman (1974) and the cognitive linguistic work of George Lakoff (2006), frames rely upon audiences’ existing belief systems, values, and narratives to carry intended meanings, or to resonate with or persuade them. Framing is a commonly used theoretical framework in media studies, pioneered by Robert Entman (1993) who explains that framing in news stories is about selection and salience, highlighting certain elements while disregarding others to promote a particular interpretation from the audience. Framings are created through giving prominence to or repeating words and symbols, connecting with cultural associations and creating resonance, thereby invoking a desired response accompanied by a moral judgement (Entman et al., 2009).
News studies concerned with visual images often use framing as a theoretical basis (Fahmy, 2010; Parry, 2010; Rafiee et al., 202) given the important meaning that visuals carry and the visual culture of news media (Thomson et al., 2023). Messaris and Abraham (2001) explain that in news stories, visuals may be more marked than words; images can convey meanings that would be more controversial through text. Images in news media are encoded with meanings, which are then decoded by the audience. These images can work to reinforce cultural stereotypes, (Parry, 2010), and are able to produce visualised meanings which support certain ideologies, as well as camouflage the constructed, historical, and social roots of ideology (Messaris and Abraham, 2001).
Other research notes that visuals in news stories often prime viewers toward dominant discourses reinforcing ‘preconceived notions and stereotypes’ rather than offering new information or perspectives (Griffin, 2004, p. 322). In this sense, images work toward setting the framing process in motion (Fahmy, 2010). When depicting newsworthy events, journalists may take photographs to accompany a report; alternatively, editorial staff may choose from a stockpile of archived images, which is common practice as news outlets are reducing staffing costs. Both approaches have bearing on the visual construction of the issue being addressed in the story and contribute to how the story identifies the problem, along with its causes, moral evaluations, and suggested solutions (Entman, 1993). Thus, news images are a selected visual construction of events (Rafiee et al., 2021). This selection by journalists is entwined with media logics like news values, news cultures, and commercial pressures that influence gatekeeping and editorial practices (Hinnant et al., 2017).
This study takes the theoretical position that news images work to visibilise or invisibilise (Thomson et al., 2023) selected aspects of an issue, and like a news text itself, can also work to legitimise or de-legitimise people, issues, and concepts based on the cultural, social, political, or economic resonance attached to the symbols in the news photographs. The legitimation of MC is a social process that becomes achievable when there is a generalised and collective perception through which MC is accepted as normalised, fitting, and desirable (Johnson et al., 2006). News media is a valuable site for observing such legitimacy unfolding, where images may portray MC as innovative, validated, and adaptable to other contexts, thus becoming part of the status quo (Johnson et al., 2006). However, such claims to normalisation may be premature and symptomatic of unchecked social privileges, as Reid (2020) argues, with stigma persisting on multiple levels.
We argue this through a focus on place; interested in how MC, and those who use it, can be legitimised within news photographs, largely through using certain geographic referents (Morris, 2023), which carry cultural associations and meanings. This is because ‘visual images are never innocent’ (Rose, 2023, p. 4) and there is a ‘slippery nature of visual meaning’ related to the importance of context (Bock, 2020, p. 7).
1.2. Place and the mediatisation of MC
Scholars have charted a continuum of MC framings in news media (Adler and Lewis, 2023; Abalo, 2021; Lewis et al., 2015; Morris, 2023), from cannabis as a drug, to a recreational ambivalent substance, to a positively valued medicine (Kępski, 2021). In this research spatiality has not been the conceptual focus, but findings have repeatedly foreshadowed its significance in affording meaning to MC. For example, Morris (2023, p. 193) reports in a study from the UK that ‘symbolic boundary work’ tied to place is a key theme in constructing meanings of the drug. He revealed that in the 1990s MC users in the British media were framed as respectable social insiders through reference to older age, social class or ‘social geographic referents’ such as ‘suburban’ (p. 139). In another Australian study of online news media, Adler and Lewis (2023) found MC’s legitimacy was also attached to place with stories often highlighting the drug’s embeddedness in community rather than in medicalised and scientific spaces.
Other research exploring visuals of MC has provided further evidence of the potential importance of place in framing the drug either positively or negatively. Drawing on 458 news media images of cannabis before and after the drug was legalised in Colorado in the United States, Mortensen et al. (2020) report that even after legalisation, images tied cannabis to criminality and ‘otherness’ with images such as mug shots or people being arrested or in jail. The role of place in the visual codification of MC is further demonstrated by Asquith (2021) and Bakken and Harden (2022) through studies of Instagram. Asquith (2021, pp. 341–342) identifies the ‘visual clichés’ attached to cannabis promotion which they label ‘conspicuous production’ and include images of cannabis as a legal product in greenhouses, labs and production facilities. Other clichés such as ‘the freedom of open space’, ‘necessary ingredient ‘and ‘authentic experiences at home’ (Asquith, 2021 pp. 344–346), afford legitimacy to the drug via place – that is, its use in a natural landscape, at social gatherings, or in a home setting. Adding to this analysis Bakken and Harder (2022, p.154) assert that as women begin using recreational cannabis on Instagram the drug is often tied to feminised spatial practices such as mothering or hanging out with girlfriends.
Research about the mediatisation of MC has revealed that MC, like cannabis, is not one ontologically discrete object, but rather situated within a multitude of discourses (Duff, 2016). To date, however, only limited attention has been given to visuals and place in the discursive process of MC meaning-making.
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Sean Hocking
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