‘You can’t stand on a corner and talk about it …’: Medicinal cannabis use, impression management and the analytical status of interviews

In this article, I examine how four medicinal cannabis users used impression management during in-depth, qualitative interviews to attend to self-presentational concerns. I examine the rhetorical strategies and narratives articulated by the participants while also attending to the role that I played in co-construction as the interviewer. Later I discuss how, although the participants’ accounts are occasioned by the interviews, they can still provide significant insights into the social worlds of the participants beyond the interviews. While discussions about whether to treat interviews as topic, resource or both are not new, I argue that we can treat interviews as both topic and resource because impression management is a product of the individual’s habitus and it and the accounts it produces are part of their social world

Medicinal cannabis users downplaying and shifting stigma: Articulations of the ‘natural’, of what is/is not a ‘drug’ and oppositions with ‘chemical’ substances

Whilst sympathy exists among the general public for chronically ill and/or disabled people who use cannabis medicinally, cannabis remains a prohibited substance in the UK. How do medicinal cannabis users negotiate this potential stigma when talking about their use of this substance? I reflect on the spoken discourses of 10 medicinal cannabis users (from a sample of 32), obtained by way of qualitative interviews, adopting a critical discourse analysis approach to the data. Specifically, I focus on their articulations around three related themes: cannabis as a ‘natural’ substance, discursive oppositions between cannabis and other substances and articulations about what is/is not a ‘drug’. I examine how participants articulated these themes in ways that attempted to negotiate the potential for stigma that talking about their substance use involved. I found they used rhetorical strategies that downplay their own deviance, attempt to shift the application of stigma to users of other substances or both. I argue that the more powerful the discursive resources that are articulated, the less rhetorical work an individual has to do to negotiate positive moral standing in an encounter. I also consider to what degree these articulations involved constructions emphasising individual self-control. I argue that in asserting that cannabis is a ‘natural’ substance (and therefore is less inherently risky to use than manufactured substances) the participants do emphasise their individual self-control