Abstract
Michael DeVillaer’s Buzz Kill: The Corporatization of Cannabis is a polemic against the commercial legalization of cannabis in Canada. The author’s goal is to explain how and why recreational cannabis use in Canada is not regulated in accordance with a public health approach to drug policy. Having testified before two parliamentary standing committees on cannabis legalization, DeVillaer effortlessly reviews drug policy evidence to advance a case for decriminalization and non-commercial legalization. To that end, he compellingly challenges the official rhetoric that promoted cannabis legalization as progressive drug policy reform. Yet whether the book adequately explains why a public health approach to cannabis law and policy has not been taken in Canada is debatable. Despite this theoretical shortcoming in DeVillaer’s account, I suggest the book is of considerable value to corporate crime scholars insofar as its insights into the politics of regulatory reform and cannabis law enforcement raise important theoretical questions about corruption and anti-corruption(ism).
In the book’s first section, the author devotes two chapters to “Laying the Foundation” of his thesis by situating drugs in their societal context. By outlining why drugs are used, how they are perceived, how they serve as socializing mechanisms, why drug-use problems develop, and how those problems have been addressed, the book is theoretically and empirically informed to challenge commercial legalization as a cannabis law reform strategy. This “data dump” (as the author describes it) details the public health crises and economic harms associated with the long-established legal drug industries in tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceuticals, clearly distinguishing a commercial approach to drug policy from a public health one. It also sets up a corruption thesis by exposing the vast evidence that should have warned legislators against commercial legalization, as indicated by the author’s decision to address this evidence once again, albeit more succinctly, in Chapter 5 “to provide a time capsule of what could have played a significant role informing the legislation” (p. 115). This is part of “The Setup” in the second section of the book which documents the “sudden major and unanticipated change” (p. 88) in the federal government’s approach to cannabis.
For DeVillaer, the “abrupt change from decriminalization to legalization” within the Liberal Party of Canada signals a case of political corruption, the subject of the anticipated “Main Event” in the third section of the book. It begins with Chapter 6 on “How It [Legalization] Really Happened and Why.” DeVillaer delivers a captivating description of the politics of regulatory reform that animated cannabis legalization to account for “how” it happened. The chapter exposes what is argued to be an “inside job” by tracing the origins of the Liberal Party’s official policy shift in favour of legalization in the “quiet” activities of a handful of Party elites with more or less direct financial interests in the cannabis industry: from a Liberal Party-connected board member of Canada’s leading addictions research organization initiating a report that unexpectedly recommended cannabis legalization over decriminalization, to corporate cannabis lobbying Members of Parliament and attending Liberal Party “cash-for-access” events, to a Parliamentary task force’s leadership understating conflicts of interest, to political elites, bureaucrats and law enforcement leaders joining the boards of directors of cannabis corporations.
To explain “why” legalization happened, DeVillaer imputes intent to the individuals involved: “The undisclosed intent was to enrich a small group of [Liberal] Party elites … [who] anticipated enormous financial rewards” (p.ix and passim). This is consistent with his acceptance of a political-legal conception of “corruption” as the abuse of public office for private gain – a notion that revolves around intention. Given the polemic form of Buzz Kill, such an explanation may be sufficient – though DeVillaer is appropriately cautious in acknowledging that his claim is an “admittedly challengeable opinion” (p. 161). Less challengeable, however, is DeVillaer’s rich description of external constraints on political actors’ decision-making. Assuming, as DeVillaer does, that “[g]overnment regulation is a battleground where public health protection competes against industry’s relentless pursuit of revenue” (p. 44), the “legacy of harm” caused by legal drug industries and enabled by permissive regulators documented in the earlier parts of the book supports a capture theory of regulation. Legalization of recreational cannabis, according to this perspective, is less an anomalous outcome necessarily explained by calculated intentions to reject public health evidence in favour of personal financial interests than it is an outcome that aligns with the institutional structure of drug regulation in general. Indeed, it is in keeping with cannabis regulation in particular, given that legalization for therapeutic use “marked the beginning of the corporatization of cannabis in Canada” (p. 139).
In Chapter 7, the “inside job” is perpetuated in the post-legalization period by what DeVillaer argues is a regulatory regime of “cronyism.” Underenforcement in the forms of inaction, permissiveness of non-compliance and even “unfathomable regulatory generosity” (p. 235), and obfuscation of enforcement data is meticulously documented to expose the failure of regulators to give effect to the public health provisions of the Cannabis Act. For DeVillaer, this is explained by the “government/industry relationships” detailed in the previous chapter. However, DeVillaer suggests that accountability for the permeability between government and industry “does not lie with regulators like Health Canada” – for they are among the “victims” insofar as they are compelled to “carefully carry out regulatory responsibilities while remaining attentive to whose personal financial interests might be at stake” (p. 245). Instead, accountability lies with the Cabinet, the body that “directs” regulatory activity – though “how far up the chain lies the origin of the tolerance for so much non-compliance and criminal conduct” remains unknown (p. 245). It follows in the concluding section of Buzz Kill that DeVillaer is relatively optimistic about future generations entering policy reform, as fresh minds without fortunes to be gained by establishing a new legal cannabis industry clouding their judgment of public health evidence, might see the value of a not-for-profit model of cannabis legalization.
Buzz Kill is a powerful account of the political and economic context of drug policy in Canada and the events surrounding its reform to legalize recreational cannabis. It stimulates thinking about the role of regulators and corporations in producing corruption, defined both narrowly and broadly. It also raises questions about anti-corruption in Canada and the relative silence about the suspicious connections identified by DeVillaer.