Regulating the Plant Versus Regulating the Drug: Learning From Backyard Cannabis Cultivation in the Australian Capital Territory

Abstract

The cultivation of cannabis has been shaped by underpinning social, political, and economic dynamics over thousands of years. Recently, a new wave of regulatory reform has opened up legal and decriminalized ways of growing, obtaining, and using cannabis plants and products. Yet in some locations, these reforms continue to be informed by conceptualizations of cannabis as “drug” invoking links to criminality. The dominant figuring of cannabis as “drug” has potentially silenced the figuring of cannabis as a “plant.” Using photo elicitation methodologies we explored “backyard” cannabis cultivation in an area of Australia that has legalized domestic cannabis cultivation for personal use. We found that current patterns, practices, and experiences of cannabis cultivators challenge the biosocial imaginings of cannabis as expressed in current legislation. By better understanding the nature of cannabis as a plant, the realities of domestic cultivation, and the relations that fold into its care and cultivation, policy makers may be able to design more coherent legislation. Our work suggests ways that regulatory systems could better attend to the nature of, and biosocial relations of cannabis the plant, rather than merely the drug, thus improving connection between regulations and people's experiences of home cultivation. The current disconnect reduces the likelihood that home cultivation—one policy that avoids the hazards of commercialization of cannabis—will be successful.

Introduction

Cannabis is one of the world's most widely grown crops. In their history of cannabis growth and cultivation, Chris Duvall (2019) provides a picture of a crop that is simultaneously the subject of intense legal proscription, while at the same time deeply interwoven with human socio-spatial practices. Duvall writes that:

Over the past five centuries, the plant genus has colonized the world… People have carried cannabis seeds into many landscapes, including colonists hoping to make rope in new lands, slaves saving seeds to plant somewhere someday, and marijuana growers trying to breed new varieties. The plant's biological dispersal was inevitably a political-economic process, because it was a human endeavour. (p. 8)

Histories of cannabis cultivation point to this biosocial interaction that includes political ecology, and the deep interweaving of the crop with humans, shaped by underpinning social, political, and economic dynamics over thousands of years (Duff, 2016). What cannabis is, at least in a botanical sense, is also a product of diverse histories and socio-cultural relations. These relations also bear the traces of colonialism, racial prejudice, orientalist exotism, and stigma (Reed, 2023; Warf, 2014). This is true also of Australia, where the introduction of cannabis cultivation is predominantly linked with the arrival of British colonial invaders in the 1700s, who planted hemp with the intention of Australia becoming a hemp colony to supply British naval boats with sails and ropes (Jiggens, 2004).

As has been extensively documented, during the 20th century cannabis was recast in the West as a dangerous psychoactive substance associated with “reefer madness,” subject to international drug treaties through the United Nations 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and rescheduled as a class I drug in US in the 1970s with other countries quickly following suit (Bewley-Taylor et al., 2014; Corva & Meisel, 2022; Ritter et al., 2022). The national Australian government passed legislation prohibiting cannabis possession, trafficking and cultivation in 1967 and 1976 in accordance with the United Nations Conventions, with states and territories also enacting their own legislation (Hughes, 2020).

As a response to increased penalties and policing of cannabis during the “war on drugs” during the 1970s and 1980s, cultivators around the world turned to more discreet forms of indoor growing, using technologies in an attempt to mimic outdoor conditions and experimenting with hybrids creating more potent strains of cannabis (Chouvy, 2019; Pollan, 2002; Potter & Klein, 2020). During the 1970s, control of Australian cannabis markets appears to also have changed hands from “hippy” cottage garden growers to organized crime syndicates, including outlaw motorcycle clubs that originally both imported and domestically grew cannabis (Bright & Deegan, 2021; Jiggens, 2004; Monterosso, 2018). Internationally, popular discourse increasingly linked indoor cultivation with higher THC levels, portraying it as a newer and more harmful form of cannabis cultivation (Decorte, 2010; Potter & Klein, 2020). In Australia, claims that the THC strength of cannabis had increased 30 times between the late 1970s and mid-1990s due to the use of hydroponic techniques was repeated in popular discourse and policy, despite being largely inconsistent with empirical evidence (Hall & Swift, 2000).

The biological and social relations of cannabis is also evident in the many ways in which the etymology of both “marijuana” and “cannabis” is deeply inflected with associations to both the natural and colonial histories of the cannabis plant (du Toit, 1996), while popular vernacular slang terms for cannabis (“grass,” “weed,” “bud,” “cabbage” and “flower”) also evoke the interweaving of cannabis plants with processes of agricultural domestication and selective modification (Small, 2015). MacDonald (2023), for example, reports that “linguistics debates surrounding cannabis”—situated in the context of post-prohibition and post-legalization—have been characterized by efforts to “change references to marijuana in the law to references to cannabis” given the “racially fraught history of the term marijuana” (p. 10). In this sense the increasing prominence of cannabis in the terminology of drug policy reform—together with associated efforts to standardize botanical nomenclatures related to Cannabis sativa and their derived products (Riboulet-Zemouli, 2020)—might be read as performing socio-political work, aligning drug law reform processes with values of (Western) science while simultaneously creating space for wider policy considerations of the social and environmental consequences of legal cannabis cultivation at a variety of scales (Dillis et al., 2021a; Dillis et al., 2021b; Reed, 2023).

Such deep historical, ecological, linguistic and policy intersections provide important context for understanding the ways in which cannabis production and cultivation has been regulated and is understood today. Within these past and present histories, different objects of cannabis “the drug” emerge and are reproduced and legitimized through law and policy (Duff, 2016; Lancaster & Rhodes, 2020; Rhodes et al., 2021). As argued by Gomart (2002), when reviewing such differences, we should ask if the drug is doing different things at different times or if it is constituted in different ways. We take such an approach as the basis for this work, building on extensive drug policy scholarship that has examined and critiqued the materiality of drugs and the ways that drugs, drug problems and policies are assembled (Duff, 2016; Fraser & Moore, 2011; Fraser et al., 2014; Gomart, 2002; Lancaster et al., 2017; Rhodes et al., 2021). Commonly described as the “ontological turn,” this scholarship draws from science and technology studies, feminist theory and anthropology to question how material objects are understood, made and remade through assemblages of effects, networks, and practice (Barad, 2003, 2007; Law, 2004; Mol, 2002; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013).

Over the past 20 years, diverse forms of liberalization, legalization, and decriminalization of cannabis use and cultivation have emerged across the world. Some scholarship has suggested these shifts represent a legal “green rush” characterized by the rapid “development of large cannabis companies, [that] pose a threat to both genetic and cultural diversity and to small cannabis farming and craft cannabis … where artisanal rather than industrial/mass producing methods are used” (Chouvy, 2023, p. 91). Others have highlighted the potential environmental consequences of legal cannabis cultivation at industrial scales (Dillis et al., 2021b), together with the exacerbation of colonial land relations and ongoing forms of environmental injustice (Reed, 2023). At the same time, the regulation of cannabis as a plant potentially opens space for new possibilities to emerge whereby the biosocial aspects of the cannabis plant—and its unique affordances and charismas—becomes both an object and agent of policy and political change (McLauchlan et al., Forthcoming).

Australia is one country with new “post-prohibition” cannabis regulation, providing an opportunity for the unmaking or remaking of cannabis and attendant implications for expanding the horizons of potential future cannabis policy. This includes how thinking with cannabis as plant may open up, disrupt or challenge conventional regulatory and policy constitutions of cannabis. Within this context of drug law reform, alongside our desire to think with cannabis as plant, in this paper we analyze the materialities and assemblages of cannabis the plant compared to cannabis the drug in the context of home cultivation regulations in one area of Australia, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Guiding research questions included: What are the particular situated and material realities of cannabis and cannabis cultivation in the ACT emerging from this new legislative environment? In what ways do these practices challenge or confirm established configurations of cannabis? What, if any, lessons can be drawn for cannabis regulation and contemporary drugs policy processes more broadly by attending to these materialities? In undertaking this research, we aim to provide a deeper understanding of how regulatory systems could better attend to the nature of, and biosocial relations of cannabis the plant.

Case Study Context

Australia is a federated nation of states and territories, that, alongside the national Australian government, share power and responsibility for drugs policy. While geographically small, the ACT hosts the nation's capital city Canberra and the national parliament, making it a politically important area. On November 28, 2018, amendments were introduced to the ACT Parliament under the Drugs of Dependence (Personal Cannabis Use) Amendment Act 2019 (ACT, s.7)—hereafter referred to as the Cannabis Act—that legally allowed possession of up to 50 g of dried cannabis and 150 g of wet or freshly harvested cannabis, and growing of up to two cannabis plants per person or four per household. As we shall explore, artificial forms of cultivation were banned. Distribution of any cannabis product of any kind (including selling, sharing, and swapping) also remained illegal—including cannabis seeds.

Prior to the passing of the Cannabis Act, there had been much debate about the regulatory status of cannabis in the ACT. During one of the Parliamentary debates, Ms. Le Couteur, a Greens Member of the ACT government, for instance, argued for a more expansive legalization of cannabis, that would “take it out of that list of dangerous drugs and treat cannabis like other plant matter” (ACT Legislative Assembly, 2019b, p. 3815). She continued, suggesting that treating cannabis as a plant “does not necessarily mean it is good for you, of course … Tobacco is not one of the better pieces of plant matter” (ACT Legislative Assembly, 2019b, p. 3815). When the debate shifted to potentially criminalizing certain types of cannabis cultivation another Greens Member (Mr. Rattenbury MP) asked: “Why do we care how people grow it?” (ACT Legislative Assembly, 2019a, p. 3832). The response from opposition Liberal Party MP Mr. Ramsay, was that “artificial” cultivation would “manipulate the strength of the THC of the cannabis plant and the yield of a cannabis plant by, for example, generating multiple growth cycles per year from the one plant” (ACT Legislative Assembly, 2019a, p. 3809).

An additional concern, and one that was accepted by the ACT government, was that such “artificial” manipulations were explicitly linked with criminality and the production of trafficable quantities of cannabis:

The police have ably demonstrated from their investigations that, through artificial cultivation, single plants that are artificially cultivated can fill a three-bedroom home—sometimes even larger… The government supports police being able to make a clear distinction between cultivation for personal use and cultivation for large-scale or commercial purposes by criminal operators. (ACT Legislative Assembly, 2019b, p. 3832).

Of course, such arguments between natural and artificial forms of cannabis are not a simple biological distinction but interwoven with assessments and proscriptions of a range of practices (Søgaard et al., 2021). “Artificial” stands in contrast to “natural,” which in Western discourses are typically associated with notions of virtue, morality and “goodness” (Søgaard & Lerkkanen, 2021; Van der Veen, 2023). This can pathologize objects and actions that do not fit within it (Fraser, 2024), including artificial forms of cultivation such as hydroponics, that operate as a kind of proxy for practices characterized by social opprobrium. The debates in the ACT reproduced earlier arguments and conceptualizations of artificial and hydroponic forms of cannabis as criminal and dangerous (Lenton, 2019; Potter & Klein, 2020).

It is within this context that we conducted our research and turned our attention to the situated and material realities of cannabis, practices of care and cultivation and how they challenged or confirmed such categorizations of cultivation practices.

Methods

This qualitative study formed part of a larger multi-disciplinary Australian Research Council Discovery Project examining participation in (illicit) drug policy. Our intent for this research was to use in-depth multispecies anthropological method otherwise known as “deep hanging out” (Geertz, 1998) to leverage insights into daily material practices, discourses, relationships, policy interdependencies, and plant-people agency. However, the time and budgetary realities of research and the lifecycle of cannabis plants made this impossible. By the time interviews could commence (March/April) we would likely already have missed the harvest season and thus would find no plants with which to hang out. In response to these constraints, we turned to photo elicitation.

Photo elicitation is a well-established method in social research whereby images are used in conjunction with in-depth interviewing in order to obtain more meaningful accounts of personal experiences and emotions (Harper, 2002). Photo elicitation offer several benefits including better centering the voices and values of participants (Richard & Lahman, 2015); highlighting relationships which might otherwise go unnoticed (Prosser & Schwartz, 1998); assisting with the elicitation of memories (Quinton et al., 2022, p. 16); and fostering greater collaboration between researcher and participant within the research process (Collier, 1995; Harper, 2002). Photo elicitation can also foster greater agency of participants, enhancing their role in the co-production of knowledge and so offers particular value for criminalized populations whose views and experiences are often marginalized or misrepresented (Alam et al., 2018; Rumpf, 2017). Photo elicitation and other arts based methods have been used to reclaim the humanity and visibility of people who use drugs and provide a counter-narrative to stigmatizing imagery (Copes et al., 2018; Goodman, 2018; Rumpf, 2017) and in multi-species research as a means of better exploring more-than human processes and subjectivities (Alam et al., 2018; McClellan, 2015).

Between May and June 2022 researchers from the University of New South Wales (LB and LM) conducted 10 photo elicitation interviews with participants, with interviews ranging from 30 min to 3 h (average length 1.5 h). To be eligible to participate, people needed to have grown cannabis in the past 12 months, reside in the ACT, be over 18 years of age, speak English, and be willing to give informed consent for the interviews to proceed, for interviews to be recorded and transcribed, and for the study to be published. Consent was collected prior to interviews either in writing (where interviews were in person), or verbally (where interviews were via Zoom). Participants were offered a $40 supermarket voucher as reimbursement for their time. Recruitment occurred via email invitations to participants of prior cannabis research conducted by some team members in 2021 (Barrett et al., 2022) (only to those participants who had given consent to be contacted for future research), and via postings in specific online cannabis growing groups in the ACT and Australia. The study received ethics approval from the University of NSW Human Research Ethics Committee (HC200911).

Although participants were invited to generate new photos for the purpose of the study, all but one participant had already documented the growth of their plants and growing journeys, sometimes over multiple seasons, providing further support for the suitability of photo elicitation for understanding growing practices.

Interviews were conducted in a range of settings: five virtually via Zoom, and five in-person (four at the participants home and one at a coffee shop). Some interviewees shared their photos prior to the interview while others presented them at the start or during the interview. While we did not collect demographic data (for privacy reasons), we were able to ascertain that four of the participants were female and six were male, two were postgraduate students and four others were either current or retired public servants (occupation of the other participants did not emerge during the interview).

At the start of each interview participants were asked about their preferred terminology and their history of cannabis cultivation before introducing the photos. We then either followed their lead or selected a photo for mutual exploration. Using a semi-structured interview approach, we followed conversations that arose in relation to the images while also using images as an opportunity to return to core pre-decided topics in each interview, including growing techniques and concepts of “good growing,” the relationship with and between other people and plant, and challenges of cultivation.

All interviews were digitally recorded and then professionally transcribed, assigned pseudonyms and identifying information removed. Using an inductive approach to analysis, the interview transcripts were read in their entirety by the team, followed by discussions on findings and themes which were then discussed and refined. All interview transcripts were then transferred to NVivo where they were reread and coded and the team met and discussed findings, iteratively reviewing and refining themes over the course of multiple meetings. In the analysis below, we present findings related to four core themes: navigating the “natural” environment; tending to a plant-drug; lingering stigma and social-relational considerations of growing; and wild plants and the challenge of growing too well.

Findings

Navigating the “Natural” Environment

Distinctions between “natural” and “artificial” modes of cultivation as used in the legislation were not useful divisions for categorizing the modes of growing cannabis in the ACT that presented themselves in our fieldwork. Instead, plants regularly moved between “artificial” and “non-artificial” environments, with gardeners navigating outside and inside spaces, technology and other interventions as a strategy for navigating the climatic and environmental conditions of the ACT. As described by Mia, the ACT can be a particularly challenging place to cultivate cannabis:

Well, the climate is really tough in Canberra for the type of plant that cannabis is. It doesn't do well over 30 degrees, and it doesn't do well under like 20-18 maybe, [laughs] and we’re like the extremes. We’re freezing and boiling. (Mia)

For Mia, protecting their plants from negative climactic impacts was one of the critical factors that influenced their decision to grow inside using hydroponic techniques. Others described keeping plants in the warmer parts of the house, such as Jess who grew cannabis seedlings along with other “precious things” (such as Padron peppers) on a fireplace that retained heat and protected plants from outside frost.

Grant was one participant who we interviewed in their home. In their living room they turned on their computer and motioned for us to gather around the screen. After clicking through a number of images of baby seedlings we stopped at one image of a room that was bathed in a soft purple light from a heat lamp. Although, Grant explained, the room with the lamp had a window that provided “a good six or seven hours of sunlight,” they were concerned about humidity and warmth and so also used lamps at the start of a crop once seeds had just been planted:

For me, I try and … again, scratching around the edge of the laws here, I like to grow them inside where it's warmer, I have grown them under lights as well, so I’ve got cheapy UV lights off eBay. (Grant)

Grant continued to flick through different photos, progressively showing the plants getting larger and being situated in different pots and areas of the house. Grant explained that once seedlings were a certain size and more likely to survive, they moved them from under the heat lamps to a sunroom ¹ for a period of time, and once they were big enough, frosts had passed (or their kids told them “dad the plants stink”), they would then be moved to an outside garden bed that had been especially constructed so as to maximize exposure to sun. After showing a photo of the bed Grant explained:

This is a spot that you wouldn't put a garden bed in unless you knew what you were doing. It's in the middle of the yard, who does that? People put them against a fence line, no, no, this was all about optimizing the garden bed for sunlight with cannabis in mind, as the primary reason to get that right. I could have grown a thousand tomatoes anywhere, that's fine, but I really want this garden bed there, because and that plant right there, because that was going to be the primary optimal spot for growing. (Grant)

In writing about markets where cannabis has been recently legalized, Huff et al. (2021) note that legislative changes upend previous assemblages of cannabis, making shared norms, meaning and values of cannabis all under negotiation. Who or what is considered to be a “legitimate” actor or cultivation technique is therefore not a shared or concrete idea. So while cannabis growing technologies may have represented certain criminally constituted means of cultivation to policy makers in the ACT (Bettina & Simon, 2021), for these cannabis cultivators artificial heat lamps and lights were a practical or common sense response to the natural environment, similar to other interventions they undertook as part of plant care.

Alongside technologies and other standard gardening interventions such as fertilizer, just like Grant, others we interviewed undertook a range of interventions to either protect plants from bad “natural” environmental effects, to mimic “good” natural conditions (e.g., providing heat and warmth in the absence of sun) or to expose their plants to the best of the existing natural conditions. Within these accounts, tender stories of plant care emerged. For instance, Ella described “waddling” plants from one balcony to another to catch natural rain and Alan talked of getting up early each morning and regularly “wiggling” their plants to knock the dew off and prevent mold. Such interventions challenge notions of “natural” cultivation with the very nature of gardening a transgression of “natural” (if meant as non-human) given various manipulations of light, soil, and so on (Duff, 2016). Indeed, the idea of what is and is not “natural” in cannabis cultivation was discussed by participants like Dave (below) who wanted to maximize the natural energy of the sun, but then noted that their interference in doing so potentially conflicted with how plants access sun when situated in nature:

The first harvest, I would regularly turn the plants, so they all got, like each side got the sun and that sort of stuff and then I thought about it before the second harvest and I thought, well, that's not really how nature works. So, in nature, the plants grow best sitting in the ground and the sun goes over them. So, me turning them around probably might not have been helping them, so I didn't do that for the second harvest, you know. (Dave)

Some of these interventions meant crossing into territories of illegality. Aside from the use of heat lamps and lights, this also included growing more plants than allowed—especially at the earlier stages to account for plant survival and/or to ensure that they had female plants (as the sex that produces cannabis bud). Ella below for example, drew attention to a photo of a plant on their balcony and explained that they had at one point provided this plant to a friend with better access to favorable “natural” conditions, even though the law prohibits people cultivating plants for others:

So, that one was the first plant and that was when it was really young. So, I had some seeds and because of my balcony, it didn't get enough direct sunlight for the seeds to germinate and it wasn't warm enough. So, I gave the seeds to a friend of mine and they grew it to sort of like a little maybe about 20 centimeters tall, and then gave it back to me and then after not very long on the balcony in the sun, it just like bloomed. (Ella)

In their attempts to navigate the legislation while maintaining these practices of protection and careful cultivation, there were a range of opinions among our participants as to what constituted “natural” growth and what was an “artificial” intervention. This included complexities of growing indoors with electric lights and heating—all assumed to fall under the “artificial” definition within law. Participants also noted there were many other ways of manipulating light for cultivators other than through the introduction of light bulbs:

If you want your plant to flower and you’re growing it in natural light and you’ve got too much light, you put a box over it, right? Then, the plant goes to sleep like a budgerigar and then decides it's time to flower… So, yes, you can artificially control the light in some very crude ways. (Alan)

And as noted by Xavier:

Obviously it's just a technicality what the light source is. Like it's the taboo factor around criminal groups growing cannabis hydroponically or indoors is the only reason why there's a manufactured difference between artificial lighting and natural lighting that inhibits people who are in apartments who don't have any space from being able to grow the cannabis safely and securely … like it should just be neutral in terms of light source. It's totally arbitrary.

Thus, while participants varied in the extent to which they used what the legislation would define as “artificial” practices, participants broadly shared a recognition that definitions of “natural” or “artificial” practices were inherently more blurred.

Tending to a Plant-Drug

A motivating factor for banning hydroponic and other “artificial” growing techniques in the legislation was their perceived ability to manipulate the drug product through strength of the THC of the cannabis plant, increase yield or the generation of multiple growth cycles per year.

When we asked participants about harvesting cannabis or cannabis strength or effect—drawing the conversation into closer alignment with the enactment of cannabis as drug product—participants responded with photos and stories filled with sensory memories. Participants drew our attention to their plants at particular stages of growth, pointing out how colors or the size of big, dense, or “chubby” buds were the sign that they were ready for harvest, or how they were guided by the smell or stickiness of the plant. In these accounts, humans were not the sole protagonists acting upon plants, rather our participants became attentive to the agential cues of the plant (van Dooren et al., 2016), and harvesting therefore was a process involving the entanglement of plant agency, human practice and technologies impacting upon one another (Van der Veen, 2023; van Dooren et al., 2016).

One example of the complex entanglements of people-plant relationships and sensory memories came from a conversation with Dave. Dave brought along hard copy images of photos they had professionally printed. Sitting in a coffee shop, Dave stopped at one close-up image of a cannabis bud and our conversation turned to harvesting where they lamented not taking any photos of the harvesting process itself:

What I didn't photograph and I really wish I had now, so then at the point where you’re harvesting…Basically, you cut the stalk off the plant, trim the bud, trim around it with scissors. It's hard work because the scissors get gummed up because they’re a bit tacky, but trim it up and then you hang it upside down in a place to dry and I bought, you know, where you would hang underpants and lingerie, you know, those little hangers. (Dave)

This account starts as a technical retelling of harvest (cut the stalk, trim the bud) but cannabis also emerges as a sticky entity gumming up scissors, and something that gets hung in the same domestic space and with the same tools as intimate undergarments. In line with Mol (2002), cannabis in this account is assembled and enacted through different practices and technologies and through its situated reality in Dave's house.

Returning to politicians’ primary concern of potential manipulation of cannabis plants through “artificial” cultivation techniques, tracking the progression of the ripening of buds was viewed as particularly important by participants for the final CBD/THC ratio of plants and perceived strength. While one participant bought a specialist jeweler’s loupe to study their plant’s trichome progression, the other participants made do with their phone cameras, often providing multiple close-up photos of cannabis in different stages of crystalline progression. As explained patiently to us by Dave, pointing to one picture:

So, what you’re looking for when the bud starts to mature, you’re looking for the hairs to go brown, which is those there, and then you’re also looking for the trichomes to start changing color… the little sac and that's all of like a liquid and it's clear and when that liquid starts to go a milky color, that's when the THC and the CBD are at sort of their peak or like the high effect. So, that's when you would harvest them, and if you leave them longer and the trichomes, they turn a bit of a brown color, then that's where the marijuana is. If you smoke it then, it's like less high, it's more like they’re called the couch lock where you’re just sitting and relaxed. (Dave)

In this account, Dave provides both a scientific and personal account of cannabis as both plant and drug. Trichomes, CBD and THC impact the type of “high” experienced when consuming the ripe product. At the same time the plants have hairs, sacs, and produce a liquid which turns a “milky color,” and these physical features and agencies of the plant must also be considered alongside the drug product and its effect.

Such commitment to plant monitoring also had other benefits that enmeshed drug product considerations with plant care and cultivation and the desire of participants to see their plants survive and thrive. For instance, mold was a significant issue for our participants that could kill entire plants and ruin existing cannabis bud therefore denying its consumption, and so bud monitoring was critical to early identification and rectification. In the same sentence explaining the color of trichomes in one photo, Alan noted:

The plant as it [photo] was taken here was a day before the mold issue started becoming apparent. You’ll notice it's a very dense plant, so it's quite thick with leaves. So, that tends to cause airflow problems around the plant. (Alan)

Alan explained that trimming plants protected them from the spread of mold (either by removing diseased plant parts or for increased air flow) but then also allowed greater light access to the plant colas, a process known as “lollipopping,” that also produced higher yields.

Discussions of seeds often highlighted the enmeshment of plant-drug and people-plant care were a critical consideration for influencing strength and yield of cannabis plants. As noted by Alan, rather than “artificial techniques”: “Genetics appear to be the single most important factor for healthy high yielding plants.” Feminized seeds were favored by some growers to guarantee female plants which produce cannabis bud and remove the risk of fertilization. Being able to access information on seed variety including the THC/CBD ratio of plants was only available to people buying seeds online and illegally from overseas markets, as the buying, selling, and swapping of seeds in ACT remains illegal under the Cannabis Act, as it is in the rest of Australia. The ability to understand plant genus was important for participants searching for a particular plant effect as described by Jess below:

I found some varieties kind of make me feel a bit too hyped up and energized, which my body can't produce the energy to keep up with that. So, that's no good. Other ones sort of gave me like a tight chest feeling. So, yeah, the ones that don't work for me… So, I’d just, you know, buy them from places like [website], reading the description about the properties of them. (Jess)

By contrast, people sourcing their seeds in the ACT were largely unaware of the genus of the plants they were growing, and even when they were, fertilization by “outside” plants meant they were then unsure of the cross hybrid that had been created, the strength (which potentially could be more potent/a higher THC variety), or its effects: “What it's THC and CBD content is I wouldn't have a clue, you know” (Bob).

These stories challenge the policy certainty around manipulation of cannabis strength and yield while also demonstrating the multiple ways that cannabis ontologies and cannabis care unfolded for our participants, through their own lives and practices, the agency of plants, technologies, and legislation.

Lingering Stigma and Social-Relational Considerations of Growing

Cannabis has a long history of illegality and related stigma, and prior research on cannabis has linked criminalization of use with deviance and exclusion (Suissa, 2001). Although cannabis use and cultivation was legal at the time of interviews, our participants were concerned that cannabis cultivation was linked to use, and that both continued to be viewed as a deviant or “suspicious”:

Yeah. I did actually hide [the cannabis plant] when it was in the pot. It was my … I was refinancing my mortgage and the valuers came. I didn't want them to think I was [laughs] like one of those, you know, suspicious people. So, I put the pots behind my blackberries and they didn't notice. (Ethan)

In our interviews both in person and on Zoom, different family members, friends, and pets appeared either on screen or in pictures, or were represented through the bicycles, shoes, other plants, and objects in the background of photos. Within the account above however, we can see that concern from participants about others knowing they grew cannabis plants only applied to certain people, usually those who held some form of social capital.

A large body of work looking at the normalization of cannabis use within certain social circles (Measham et al., 1994; Pennay & Measham, 2016) notes that people who use cannabis can continue to be guarded about their use to avoid the “threat of sanctions from authorities, or loss of statues, or offending non-users who may disapprove,” with those who do not exercise appropriate discretion potentially “excluded, maligned or undervalued” (Hathaway et al., 2011, p. 453).

At the same time, the concern of the social standing of others impacted material practices of cultivation, leading people to physically relocate or hide plants at various times and influencing their decision of how and where to grow their plants. In the quote above, plants were relocated to hide them from a mortgage broker, in another instance, one participant described dropping their plants over the balcony when their mum came to visit and another of hiding them behind other plants when neighbors came over. The freedom to move plants around as needed meant that growing in pots was actually seen as preferential to growing in garden beds by one participant:

The other thing I don't like about the idea of growing in a fixed spot in a garden or something, it's about privacy and visibility. (Alan)

Mia was the only person we spoke to who grew their plants hydroponically at the time of our interview, which took place on Zoom and during which Mia held up photos that documented their journey of care and cultivation. While discussing one image of their cat sitting comfortably in the middle of their cannabis plants, our conversation turned to Mia's motivations for using a hydroponic grow tent instead of their backyard garden bed. Fear of the neighbors finding out they were growing cannabis was one of the primary influences over their decision to grow hydroponically. As they explained:

Once I started learning about the plant and, yeah, I just thought growing outside is going to be like the pits, absolute worst, and we’ll probably end up with being discovered by our neighbors and, you know, like we’ve got a doctor on one side and we’ve got an elderly couple in their 90s on the other side, and the people over the back fence are nurses and [laughs] there are tiny little kids, you know, newborn kind of thing, and I just couldn't stand the thought of them knowing. (Mia)

In addition to the impact it had on material practices, stigma also appeared to have shaped accounts of “legitimate” forms of cannabis in conversation. In conversations that mentioned “outsiders,” others, or touched on policy related domains, interviewees were quick to distance themselves, their cannabis plants and their cannabis cultivation from illicit drug narratives. For instance, while looking at Ella's cannabis photos we inquired if they had any concerns about other people seeing their cannabis plants on their balcony:

So, I know that one of my friends at the time was nervous for me [growing cannabis]. They were like, ‘What if someone sees?’ But in my head, I’m like it is just a plant. Even if you’re using it as a drug, it is just a plant and then again, when I first started using, it was for pain relief, medicinal purposes. So, again, I never really saw it as, ooh, this illicit drug kind of thing. (Ella)

As noted by Huff et al. (2021), legitimacy of cannabis is often attempted through discursive and sensory alignments with plants and distancing from cannabis as a drug. In this excerpt, the participant draws distinctions between cannabis the plant and drug, medicinal drugs and other “illicit drugs,” although also emphasizing that even where cannabis is used as a drug it is still a plant. In doing so, the participant uses all of the “ontological registers” commonly used to describe cannabis through this prism of drug, non-drug, and medicine (Duff, 2016, p. 680). However, in the account above it is also all three at once, or as described by Søgaard and Lerkannen (2021, p. 324) a “multiple object” with boundaries that are blurred in practice giving rise “to complexities, overlapping inferences and ambiguities,” ultimately proof that there is ongoing boundary making to produce cannabis as a particular object.

Wild Plants and the Challenge of Growing too Well

A particular challenge for participants was that when they provided cannabis plants with the right conditions to grow well, they grew well in ways that were both large and abundant. Growing healthy, large plants is generally the goal for gardeners, and participants seemed particularly eager to show us photos of plants that filled the screen with adjacent exclamations such as “we called it big lady” (Bob) and “bloody enormous” (Grant) or of selfies with themselves or partners dwarfed by towering plants. However, cannabis plants occupying a dual space of plant and drug meant that growing too well was in contravention of the law's caps on allowable quantities of harvestable cannabis. Growing too well was a theme particularly raised by people who had access to garden beds that provided plants with an unbounded environment where their roots could spread and grow.

Quite often, growing too well was an accident. Xavier for instance, showed us a sequence of photos of cannabis plants situated in a garden bed they explained was next to a path used by the owner of the property and another tenant. Xavier recalled how their partner had tended to the soil first, turning a “wasteland” into a fairly fertile garden bed, and noted it was “in pretty much full sun all day. Very rich soils, lots of space to grow in all directions. So, this is ideal conditions for growth.” After discreetly planting some cannabis among other flowers and vegetables, Xavier and their partner left for a few weeks on a holiday, during which it was “so rainy and so sunny here, it just exploded.” Turning to a photo of Xavier's girlfriend smiling cheekily under a large cannabis plant, Xavier explained that they had returned to over two-meter-high cannabis plants that were nearly reaching over the neighbors’ fence.

So, we got back and I was, you know, terrified. [laughs] This was not what I thought. I thought like my landlord had seen a little plant amidst some other like fox gloves and some delicate little flowers and been like, ‘Oh, just …’ you know, but no, it looked like we’ve got a fucking cannabis plantation. (Xavier)

Later on in the same interview, Xavier also showed a photo of a cannabis plant in their friend's garden that was truly accidental in that it was the result of “spontaneous growing” (i.e., was not intentionally sown)—the result of some seeds falling through their wooden decking as they sat on the patio one day “mulling up” [rolling a joint or spliff]. Without tending to the plant at all, it had grown to an astonishing size, filling the frame of the photo and dwarfing another cannabis plant in a pot in the background:

So, this is self-seeded and just grown with no incentive, nothing. He's just let it grow and it ended up like keloids, like that was a trafficable amount of cannabis growth from that one plant. (Xavier)

Growing too well also brought with it concern around theft as large plants became conspicuous to potential outsiders. Many, like Yvette, did their best to hide or disguise well-growing plants. Pointing to a picture of a beautiful cottage garden with large cannabis plants in the corner next to a fence, Yvette talked about the privacy screen they erected by attaching a large piece of material to some poles:

So down the side of the house there, you’ll notice there's a big gully. There's no one living down there and I got really paranoid because, you know, as you can kind of see from this photo here, the plant grows higher than the fence and people, although there's no path immediately next to our place, people do walk there… So, I’d always get paranoid that someone would walk past and smell it because, you know, they smell really, really strongly or even see it. So, I ended up erecting this kind of like jerry rig kind of …. (Yvette)

Ironically, growing too well then influenced cultivators to use more interventions and types of control, moving the plant away from its more “natural” state. For example, Alan, commenting on one photo, described training their plants so that they did not grow straight up:

The idea is that it keeps it low so that people aren't sticking their nose into my business, but also lets you get more tops of the plants, so you get like fatter bud on the branches… The height thing is nice, like I feel a lot more confident with the lower squatter plants rather than a Christmas tree that was taller than me and people would sort of wander around the back of the house to have a look at. It's a bit disconcerting at times.

For others, being able to exert more control over plants rather than leaving things to nature was preferable, including being able to move plants around to protect them from thieves, and to control the number of plants grown so that they could comply with the laws on plant caps. The one person we interviewed who was solely using indoor hydroponics to grow their cannabis had a discreet grow tent located at the back of their garage where they could adequately control their two plants and keep them away from prying eyes.

Comparatively, two participants who emphasized their “natural” gardening approaches were both in contravention of the caps on the number of plants due to their lack of intervention described by one as working “on the basis of letting everything rip” (Bob), as their plants had become fertilized producing seeds and self-propagating.

I just think it's nature doing what it does and I really respect it. I think it's great. The seeds that it produces, I mean I’m not going to do anything with them. They get shaken by the wind and they just drop into the garden bed and naturally propagate itself. So, I just let nature take its course. (Ethan)

Conclusion

Small-scale home cultivation of cannabis for personal use is seen as a potentially positive cannabis supply option under the Drugs of Dependence (Personal Cannabis Use) Amendment Act 2019, that avoids the hazards of commercialization and for-profit models of cannabis supply (Belackova et al., 2019; Decorte, 2010; Pardal et al., 2023). As shown in the experiences of the United States and Canada, commercialization of cannabis supply can have unintended negative consequences at the population level (Hall & Lynskey, 2020; Myran et al., 2023; Shi & Liang, 2020), and for the environment where large-scale commercial cannabis farms have emerged (Kavousi et al., 2022; Polson et al., 2023; Silvaggio, 2021). If the policy objective is to support small-scale home cultivation for personal use, then regulators need to consider cannabis not just as a drug, but also as plant, and design regulations that take into account the nature of cannabis the plant, its horticultural features, and the relations of growing and care that are enfolded within it.

We found that concepts of natural and artificial growing relied on by lawmakers to regulate cannabis cultivation in the ACT are far removed from the practical realities of plants and people and the environments within which they reside. The legislation's use of natural/artificial divisions reflects outdated cultural binaries to demarcate and police socially acceptable and unacceptable behaviors rather than reflect the material practices of growing cannabis under a new regulatory regime. It seems clear from our data that definitions of “natural” or “artificial” practices were inherently blurred. Demarcating the difference between a heat lamp and “wiggling” the plant, where both entail human–plant interaction, poses a challenge for legislators. In the first instance, creating cannabis home cultivation legislation that prevents effective home growing is counter-productive to the aims of the reform. At a minimum, policy makers need to ensure that legislation does not prevent sensible gardening practices for the home cultivator. The legislative distinction between natural and artificial is therefore unhelpful, as our participants’ practices demonstrated, and considerations for how to more thoughtfully specify what may be either commercial quantities or high yield THC practices is needed.

Another challenge is the problem of high yield for home cultivators. As shown here, some of our participants grew too well (outside the bounds of the legislation), not through intention but through the behavior of the plant. This highlights the inadequacies of human regulation in attempting to tame the natural world, or at least of trying to contain the physicality of plants through regulation. As botanists have pointed out, plants biological drive for survival combined with the agendas of humans creates complex entanglements manifesting in practical and social practices (Pollan, 2002; Van der Veen, 2023). Ironically in this case, interventions such as hydroponics, which were seen as evidence of criminality by some lawmakers, were used by participants to better adhere to the law and as a commonsense approach to everyday gardening challenges.

Instead of criminal motivations, the interventions of our backyard cultivators were guided by a combination of environmental conditions of growing and the perceived needs of the plant, social relationships (and within that who has access to the cultivation space) and notions of and adherence to “natural” gardening techniques. At the same time, our analysis illuminates that cannabis is both a plant and a drug. There were practices of care and routine that were special and different to other plants, materializing cannabis the plant as more than plant alone.

There is some research that suggests small-scale and particularly self-supply cannabis cultivation is a “relatively low-risk practice” (Belackova et al., 2020, p. 154) with various benefits including avoiding the black market and potential contaminants, greater knowledge about products, and the production of less harmful and higher quality cannabis (Aguiar & Musto, 2022; Belackova, 2020; Decorte, 2010; Pardal, 2018; Potter et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2025). Other research however has noted the heterogeneous growing practices and integration of technologies within these groups (Lenton et al., 2018; Lenton et al., 2024). Future research could therefore examine the effects of the framing of commercial supply as negative and home cultivation as positive, and, whether the regulation of home cultivation plays a role in constituting the supposed harms of the commercial market.

In many ways, participants’ accounts and experiences of cannabis cultivation point to the need for a broader lens in determining the types of regulatory settings that will be meaningful and useful in future cannabis regulation. Cannabis, as an object that not only occupies dual frames of plant and drug, also exists as an object with multiple boundaries (Søgaard & Lerkkanen, 2021) that in our study cut across biological and social relations. Acknowledging the entanglements of these boundaries and materialities, and seeking to better understand the dynamic ways in which cannabis exists is likely to result in more practical and “commonsense” policy making (Van der Veen, 2023). As noted by Rhodes et al.:

Rather than treating humans and environments as isolatable yet inter-acting entities, as if they can be pulled apart, a more-than-human approach treats these elements as always entangled, intra-acting, and thus becoming-with the other. (Rhodes et al., 2021, p. 6)

Our analysis also points to the continuing impact of stigma surrounding cannabis as an illicit drug, despite home cultivation being technically legal for these participants. This presents a cautionary note to legislators; a desire to see home cultivation as a mechanism for safer cannabis supply would need to be accompanied by efforts to address stigmatizing relations associated with cannabis and its use.

Our work suggests that the legalization of cannabis cultivation raises questions that pertain not simply to growth of cannabis plants per se, but how cannabis might be grown well. By focusing on small-scale and domestic cultivation, current regulations bring into view the cannabis plant itself, with its unique biosocial affordances and overlapping histories. For this reason, lawmakers seeking to maximize cannabis home cultivation to reduce the hazards of commercial cannabis supply have the opportunity to create more coherent policy if they are able to take account of cannabis as a plant as well as a drug. More work examining the practices of small-scale cannabis growing and home cultivation—including those that enable cannabis plants to thrive in specific environmental and climatic conditions—could inform legislative and reform processes and provide a counter-narrative to the prevailing (largely police-led) dialogue around growing practices. Indeed, inviting horticulturists to work with lawmakers, in addition to encouraging knowledge and skill sharing between domestic cannabis cultivators, would be a positive first step.