Podcasts

Cannabis Studies Lab Interview Series

Our newest podcast introducing all the members of our Lab.

Subsistence Crop

This podcast expands conversations about cannabis beyond prohibition and the commercial logics of today’s legal markets. It asks who and what this plant has meant to people and places where cannabis has never been only about control or profit, and what we can learn from its global cultural legacy before, during, and after prohibition.

The podcast’s name draws from Ray Raphael’s 1985 book on the rise of cannabis culture in Southern Humboldt, tracing the shift from a hippie “cash crop” to a modern industry often disconnected from the back-to-the-land values of the 1970s. As commercialization has diminished cannabis’s economic value, new space has opened to foreground more-than-cash concerns—environmental stewardship, social justice, regenerative cultivation, and genetic diversity—offering richer ways to study and understand cannabis today.