Arts of noticing unloved others: reflections on the importance of methods,meetings,and affect in cannabis policy

Cannabis regulation in Australia and the Australian Capital Territory

Cannabis cultivation was introduced into Australia by British colonial invaders in the 1700s hoping to create a hemp colony to supply ropes and sails to British navy ships. ³³ Its cultivation, use and possession was criminalized across Australia in the 1960s and 1970s following international United Nations drug treaties. But in 1987 Australia became one of the first countries to adopt a civil penalty scheme for cannabis in the state of South Australia through the South Australian Cannabis Expiation Notice scheme. ³⁴ While some Australian politicians were influenced by the US ‘war on drugs’, adopting similar rhetoric and policies promoting a hardline approach to drugs during the 1970 and 1980s; toward the end of the 1980s onwards, Australian states and territories progressively adopted policies that allowed a non-criminal response to cultivation, use and possession of small amounts of cannabis.

Notable in Australian histories of cannabis cultivation is its embeddedness in white communities, with cultivation and distribution in the 60s and 70s occurring within white middle-class hippy communities which were subsequently replaced by white outlaw motorcycle clubs. ³⁵ Broader Australian histories of drug policies and policing beyond cannabis are complex and enmeshed in the British colonial project including ongoing subjugation and dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from their lands, and the ‘White Australia Policy’ that limited immigration to Australia from non-European countries. ³⁶ The history of drug prohibition, laws and policing have often times been used as a tool to target different racial minorities within Australia including people of southeast Asian descent ³⁷ and First Nations peoples in particular, who continue to be targeted and criminalized for drug use resulting in overrepresentation in crime statistics. ³⁸

At time of writing, all Australian states and territories have some form of schemes in place for police to offer a non-criminal response to cannabis possession for personal use, ³⁹ but the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) became the first jurisdiction in Australia to legally allow cannabis cultivation alongside possession. The ACT is geographically small, but politically important as it is home to Australia’s capital city, Canberra, the national parliament, and is the location of many national government agencies. It has also been the first jurisdiction to adopt a number of progressive policies which have then been taken up either nationally or by other states and territories. Under the new cannabis laws in the ACT, households are allowed to grow up to a maximum of two cannabis plants per person (maximum of four per household), with possession capped at 50 g of dried cannabis and 150 g of wet or freshly harvested cannabis. Purchasing, selling, and other distribution of cannabis products (including swapping or sharing) remains banned. ‘Artificial cultivation’, defined as hydroponic cultivation or cultivation ‘with the application of an artificial source of light or heat’ ⁴⁰ also remains banned, with provisions on growing emerging from debates that framed cannabis primarily as a drug commodity, overlooking its material and relational realities as a plant. ⁴¹ This narrow framing underscores our argument: that policy assemblages often exclude the multispecies entanglements they seek to govern.

Ecological charisma shifts

The first of Lorimer’s tri-partite frame, an organism’s ‘ecological charisma’ rests on the ease with which a human ‘in possession of all their senses and with limited technological assistance’ can sense the organism. ⁵³ For example, writing of corncrakes, ⁵⁴ Lorimer notes that, ‘in spite of its elusive diurnal behavior’, the male corncrake is reasonably charismatic, ecologically, on account of its nocturnal call being one that is easily heard and identified by humans. ⁵⁵ In many ways, this charisma – based on whether or not we can perceive another – is the foundation for having any sort of relationship with another being, whether positive or negative.

Cannabis is a distinctive and highly-identifiable plant – potentially highly ecologically charismatic in terms of its physical visibility as well as its scent. However, due to previous laws that prohibited the cultivation of cannabis, it is one that has, for some, remained hidden and not commonly encountered. Through this study, the basic ecological charisma of cannabis shifted for us as we got to see the plant in images, and on one occasion in person. For the majority of our participants, the change in law meant that they too got to see and meet cannabis plants for the first time through the act of growing them. Many observed that they found the plant to be novel, extraordinary and not like other ‘normal’ plants due to its complex life-cycle and the labor and knowledge required for harvesting and curing cannabis.

Ecological charisma relates to not just the ability to see another species, but the ability to sense it more generally. Lorimer describes recognition of the corncrake call as an important aspect of its ecological charisma for British birders, allowing it to be identified as a particular species among others. ⁵⁶ For cannabis, the most distinctive aspect of ecological charisma aside from its visual appearance was its distinctive smell. Smell was a clear indicator for participants of ripening flower bud and for some, flagged a sense of readiness to be moved from a protected indoor environment to outdoors, such as Patrick ⁵⁷ who knew when this moment arrived when their (teenage) kids started saying ‘dad the plants stink!’. Patrick elaborated on the smell being an aspect of seasonality, waxing and waning during different parts of the growing process noting they ‘didn’t have as much this year in terms of aroma, but then again, I didn’t have as much successful cropping this year’ (Patrick). Both developing a sense of the meaning of particular cannabis scents – as well as people’s relationships with the smells – was something that shifted with time and experience. Holly, for example, noted initially not liking the plant ‘stink’ as it was something they had not encountered before. However, they came to like the smell due to its connection to successful flowering:

It’s the smell of success really because it means that your plants have gone into flower and you’re going to get a nice harvest and that sort of stuff (Holly).

For some cultivators, the positive visual ecological charisma of cannabis was enhanced by the use of the simple technology of magnifying their plants using their phones or enlarging photos on their computers to examine the plant more carefully. The use of technology provided performative and transformative work here. ⁵⁸ Firstly the ability to zoom in on the trichomes led to participants’ literal ability to see differences in the trichomes, enacting cultivation and care through monitoring and tracking the physical development of trichomes, (the small glandular globes that are the main source of cannabinoids). ⁵⁹ Trichome development was something keenly watched by participants, as the feel and color change in the trichomes conveyed how ‘ready’ or ‘ripe’ the plant was to harvest. At the same time as this productionist practice, technologies also presented opportunities to see and experience cannabis differently. Under magnification, the psychoactive substance of cannabis transformed into lively aesthetics, with participants variously describing trichomes as ‘like dandruff’ or something of remarkable beauty. One participant who described their approach to cannabis cultivation as scientific and provided a markedly rational/scientific description of trichome ripening, was also not unaffected by the beauty of trichomes which they described as ‘sparkly’ (Ryan; Figure 1). Charisma was therefore also conveyed by participants in using words that themselves were evocative of the lively and beautiful life worlds of the cannabis plant.

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Figure 1.

‘Sparkly trichomes’ (photo supplied by Ryan).

Aesthetic charisma shifts

For Lorimer, the aesthetic charisma of an organism relates to the emotional responses humans have to the being’s appearance or behavior, whether such encounters are in the flesh or textual. ⁶⁰ In this, Lorimer notes that human attraction and revulsion tends to be variously oriented toward both nonhuman difference and similarity. ⁶¹ That is, while organisms that are experienced by humans as domestic and/or cute can have a charm for some, radical difference, ‘feral transgression’, ‘unpredictability and autonomy’ of nonhumans can appeal to others, so that both the panda and the giant squid have aesthetic charisma. ⁶² For Lorimer, such responses are naturecultural, in that nonhuman charisma is intimately tied up with both the ‘agency of the nonhuman being witnessed and the social structure in which the witness is enmeshed’. ⁶³ For aesthetic charisma, this inseparability of the physical presence of a particular being on humans and the sociocultural worlds in which the subject and witnessing creatures find themselves can be seen in the ways in which certain people actively dislike ‘cute’ species, tending to care instead for the grotesque or other-worldly. ⁶⁴ While biological and physical propensities do seem to play a part in people’s fondness for one species over another, in practice, a vast array of stories, social pressures and personal experiences play into the ways in which one comes to care for others. ⁶⁵ The tendency for rats to proliferate in particular ways, or for snakes to bite, or dogs to be useful, or roses to smell as they do, however, does seem to play some part in the responses of people to such species, but people can and do still come to respond in affectively varied ways to these different kinds of beings. ⁶⁶

In the stories told by our participants, we met cannabis as both a charming and decidedly ‘cute’ part of the family, as well as an organism respected for its radical otherliness. There was exuberant charisma to these plants that was fundamentally about their precise too-much-ness – the exuberant vitality of cannabis, its tendency to overflow spatial and regulatory confines; the stories that emerged in concert with the images were of growers trying to discreetly grow their crops, but the plant growth quickly exceeding fences and privacy shields and becoming a huge plant visible (in a visual and olfactory sense) to others. Charisma was present in participants’ wonder of the plants. In contrast to the affective seriousness of law-and-order framings, cannabis emerged as hilarious, charming, and surprising. Reflecting on a photo of seedlings on a window ledge in little pots (Figure 2), for example, one participant described the experience of those seedlings emerging:

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Figure 2.

New arrivals (photo supplied by Francis).

Here, (as in other photos with their arising stories), we found ourselves pulled into a world marked by relationship and care. There was a level of symbioses to these relationships – part of the love and joy experienced was due to the plants responding to the love and care provided. ⁶⁷ Several participants noted that this relationship between cannabis and grower was marked as more than, or other than, ‘normal’ gardener- plant relationships. For some participants, the extraordinariness of cannabis and care that this entailed was due to the extraordinary nature of the plant product. As one participant noted – in fond contrast to the more laisse-faire gardening approaches of his partner – he was more ‘committed and more invested . . . more passionate’ because he was not growing an ordinary foodstuff (like tomatoes), but was in fact, growing a psychoactive drug:

. . . I’m more a nurturing kind of father whereas she’ll water them a couple of times a week and she might go out and have a look and that sort of stuff, but yeah, I guess, we have a different view on it. She’s just growing tomato plants, but I’m growing marijuana (Francis).

Across these responses, there appeared a gendered dimension to the relations and practices of care. A familial and loving tone was echoed in the language used by many of our participants toward their female plants, who were anthropomorphized as ‘my babies’, ‘my girls’, ‘big lady,’ or ‘my ladies’ with the gendered use of language reflecting the fact that it is only the female cannabis plants that produce the sought after cannabis ‘bud’. By contrast, male plants were framed as threats due to their ability to fertilize female plants and thus divert energy away from resin production, reducing potency, yield and creating seeds (that are not smokeable) within the cannabis bud. Male plants were often ‘culled’ to protect the crop. ‘You get rid of the boys’ stated Francis, although their removal of male plants was described as both necessary and emotionally fraught. Francis continued, ‘When you’re confident it’s a boy, it’s quite a sad feeling . . . one of your girls, she’s going, she’s getting voted out’. Others, like Blair, tried to keep males separate from females to avoid fertilization, but the failure of this approach (and subsequent fertilization of his entire crop) led him to commit to a more pragmatic approach: ‘Next year, hang on, the boys will be dead as soon as they’re identified. That’s the only way of doing it’.

Such relations and practices resonate with Lorimer’s notion of nonhuman charisma as a relational property that emerges through always-entangled embodied encounters and cultural frames. ⁶⁸ Here, female plants exhibit a form of corporeal charisma – their affordances and usefulness trigger care and attachment. For all the charms of cannabis that were not directly about consumption, the possibility of consumption, and what Lawrence refers to as the ‘utilitarian valuation of productive life’ ⁶⁹ loomed large; ‘good’ crops were valued and played into the valuing of female plants. This gender-based valuing of plants remained true for participants who were not particularly interested in consuming cannabis themselves. In such instances, the possibility of sharing products with friends, or at least not destroying the crops of others in the neighborhood, played into the killability of male plants – positioning them as disposable within regimes of care and control. ⁷⁰ This disposability is particularly apparent in Francis mourning his recognition of a plant as being male as the loss of a female plant, rather than the impending death of that male. While more than a commodity, the commodity element of cannabis is a vital aspect of the cultural ground within which it is made sense of. For Blair, male plants performed a kind of ‘feral charisma’ ⁷¹ for a season of experimentation. However, the realities of the presence of male plants and their reduction of crop quality shifted male plants into the category of the ‘killable’, ⁷² to be made ‘dead as soon as they’re identified’.

Plant-cultivator relationships often unfolded within broader familial and domestic dynamics between partners, flat mates, adult children, pets and parents, who moved in and out of the interview spaces, or emerged in photos, memories, and stories. The framing used by participants in describing their experiences of care and cultivation was also situated in family relational dynamics. One participant describing the joy of seeing their plant grow and change noted ‘Like it’s always super exciting. It’s like, oh my little baby’s grown up, you know’ (Holly), and another likened the need to re-pot their plants to kids needing new clothes:

They’re growers, you know. It’s like small kids. They want bigger clothes, so they can keep growing, you know. So, you need to re-pot them (Toby).

The photos shown to us by participants who had been documenting their growing journey were also reminiscent of a family photo album with participants noting that they were moved to capture particular life stages or moments in growing that were emotional, joyful or otherwise meaningful. We suggest that the form of the images also had effects, with the typically chronologically ordered nature of the photos leading to discussions with participants at times feeling reminiscent of poring over family photos. When we asked one participant about a photo of some coffee jars of cannabis on a gravel road (Figure 3), Toby explained that:

This was one of those Marie Kondo photos where I stopped to take this photo because I was full of pure joy just in this moment . . . So, I stopped to take this photo because I had this feeling like, wow, this is like . . . again, you know, the seed tray is the start of a journey. This is like the end of a journey and its sort of like, you know, it’s being harvested, it’s ready to consume, and now it’s something that’s grown at the side of my house and now I’m walking it to my friend’s house.

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Figure 3.

On the road (photo supplied by Toby).

Other photos and stories attempted to capture the excitement (and sometimes fear) of the plants as wild and transgressive. One participant told of the pure joy of a self-sown plant that ‘just exploded’:

The pure joy about this, is [that] this is from the same seeds that I’ve been growing. So, it’s from that same original batch. The person got this stuff, and this seed is pure joy because this was spontaneous growing. This came from him sitting on the patio, mulling up, and seeds, just like dropping the seeds because there’s so many, just dropping the seeds through his like wooden decking (Toby).

In this and other interviews, cannabis emerged as a delight, not so much in spite of its unruly nature, but because of it. Indeed, several participants had also grown the fast-growing but lower yield ‘auto’ flowering cannabis species but expressed disappointment in these much smaller ‘not very thankful’ (Holly) plants and returned to the rambunctious ‘photo flowering’ varieties.

So, I had her [photo of flowering plant – Figure 4], she’s a big girl, but behind her there you can’t even see, I had an auto planted as well, which I never bothered taking photos of, it was never spectacular (Holly).

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Figure 4.

Thankful plants (photo supplied by Holly).

In line with Lorimer’s acknowledgment that some people celebrate ‘nonhuman tricksters’, ⁷³ the unruly growth of cannabis was framed as something that was valued precisely for its non-domestic, wild, properties. For some, this inclination for plants to grow so large and wild was also a thrill of the plant being rebellious and sneaking outside of its provided confines. Describing a photo of one person’s partner grinning broadly beside their cannabis plants, Will notes:

She’s [partner] 1.65 meters. This one [plant] just grew like a monster, like a big Christmas tree . . . Easily over 2 meters. It’s probably 2.1. Yeah, so it did poke out a bit. It looked like a, you know, Christmas tree actually.

Several participants noted that, considering their usually ordered lives (many of our participants had been or were working in government jobs; a common occupation in Canberra, where Australia’s federal government is located), this rambunctiousness of the plant was a particularly important aspect of its charm.

Corporeal charisma shifts

Charisma, Lorimer argues, also includes aspects of felt experience in the presence of the other. Lorimer defines such ‘corporeal charisma’ as ‘the feelings engendered in proximal, multisensory encounters’ with a target organism. ⁷⁴ This includes not just the organism, but the broader ecology in which the organism exists, and the feelings encouraged in its presence. As noted by Huff et al., the way human actors interpret objects often goes beyond language to ‘expressive’ capacities including shape, color, taste, smell, and other ‘sensory cues’. ⁷⁵ However, these experiences should not be thought of as unmediated by cultural practices or personal histories. Instead, the feelings that emerged within these multisensory meetings were also influenced by people’s views of the plants, love of learning and perhaps also enjoyment of a degree of mastery. While coming to share in aspects of these experiences did seem to also require being in the presence of the actual plants, in others, being enthusiastically told about the experience – particularly with visual cues – did give us a taste of experiences of cannabis’ corporeal charisma.

Smell was one such sensory experience. As described earlier, plant smells often signaled specific plant needs or plant success, but participants also described the smell as a site of joy and pleasure, including the ‘pungent’ but ‘beautiful’ smells that drew comparisons with herbal tea, lemon, pine, and grass clippings and even cheese as described by Amy below:

Well, they all smell so different. Like my friend gave me a variety and it was called Blue Cheese and it absolutely stank, like blue veined, like a Roquefort or something. It was really pungent, but they all do have . . . like the Nightingale, I guess, you associate it with something pleasurable. So, yeah, I really like the smell from it (Amy).

The surprising differences in the olfactory registers of different plants and products was also a site of interest and intrigue, one that we as researchers were drawn into when were introduced to some dried cannabis product and encouraged to smell the product ourselves, LB excitedly exclaimed ‘it smells a bit like milk!’. One participant also noted that the smell had elicited a psychological response as one might expect from essential oil – ‘it just perks me up’ (Will).

Lorimer notes that, particularly for those studying such organisms, corporeal charisma often involves both experiences of jouissance – or the joy in the presence of meaning – or epiphany – experiences that leave one opened in new ways. ⁷⁶ As Lorimer notes, one aspect of jouissance is that of the delight in learning about the other. For some participants, this was present in coming to understand the lifecycle of the plant. For others, perhaps curiously, it was in developing the skills to navigate cannabis disease and illness. Certainly, there were unique challenges associated with growing cannabis that set it apart from other plants, such as the propensity to turn into a hermaphrodite, and skill needed to sex plants and determine optimum ripeness. Mastering these challenges brought great satisfaction to some participants. For example, as Blair (below) noted:

From a botanical perspective, it’s one hell of an interesting plant because, hang on, you’ve got male and female, but also it is highly seasonal, as in you have your growth patch. When the sun changes, right, and the days become shorter after Christmas, then it goes into reproductive stage and so you’ve got these two, and I’ve got a little plant out there that would be that tall, what’s that, 6 inches at the most. Hang on, it’s got bugs on it (Blair).

People also told a range of tales of delight of being in the presence of these plants:

Okay. I know it sounds cliched, but I really love these plants and I’ll actually hug them. I know it sounds really cliched and you probably think I’m a tree-hugging hippie, but I genuinely think they look really, really cool. I just like the presence of them. I feel they are like a really spiritual plant. Like I know, you know, it sounds a bit wishy-washy, but I genuinely really appreciate growing these and I would hug them. So, all the way through the whole life cycle, you know, I’ll look at them every day, just they look so cool. I like the geometry (Will).

Here, both the aesthetic and sensory aspects of the plant – as interpreted through specific cultural understandings of the plant – were fundamental to this sense of felt meaning in the presence of the plant. The greenness and vitality of the plant were also sources of comfort and jouissance for other participants, with the dark green color of leaves being associated with plant health and being ‘soothing’ (Marie), and something nice to look at (Holly; Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Geometric pleasures (photo supplied by Toby).

Material-storying

The materiality of a species is a vital aspect of its charisma. Yet, as Lorimer notes, it never acts alone: the detectability (ecological charisma), aesthetic charisma, and corporeal charisma of another species are all entangled with human relationships and meanings. ⁷⁷ In distinguishing his work both from the functionalist accounts of human fondness for other organisms, as well as from those that emphasize the only socially-constructed aspects of charisma, Lorimer argues that charisma is always relational – emerging in the relationships between the material and social aspects of our lives with others.

Environmental humanities scholarship has amplified our understandings of how stories matter – that a ‘good story’ can inspire acceptance ‘beyond self and species’, ⁷⁸ and that storying offers insights to and opens up alternative modes of being ⁷⁹ with the potential to ‘speak into existence alternative worlds and ontologies’. ⁸⁰ Part of the particular charm of these stories is, however, that they were not just made of words, but instead allowed the affordances and charisma of the plants to be part of the tale. As noted by Van der Veen, while there may be a tendency to view plants as passive objects, there are complex webs of entanglements when plants and people interact, creating dynamic relationships in which plants act as agents alongside the varying materialities and meshworks that exist. ⁸¹ As found in our research, visual storying allows these meshworks to unfold, connecting the unknown and the ‘out there’ of policy to the here and now, while also connecting people to practices and ways of being that have material consequences. ⁸²

As Anna Tsing notes, relationships with other-than-human species are mediated by other humans and the type of mediation that occurs can call us to care. In her work with the matsutake mushroom group, for example, Tsing charts the various ways in which people have come to fall in love with the mushroom. ⁸³ For some, it was curiosity about the little-understood ways in which the mushroom emerged, the invitation to contribute to scientific understandings; for others it was the taste that was used to encourage people to come to tend to the red pine forests in which matsutake emerge. In many instances, such meetings had particular human guides, forest guides, field guides, scientist-teachers, and artists. In this work, the talents of humans and their arts to call us to care – including through cooking, storytelling, poetry, painting, and even taxonomy. For Tsing, these arts of noticing are ‘a way of teaching . . . open yet focused attention’ and can be a means of creating ‘passionate immersion in the lives of the nonhumans’. ⁸⁴

In this particular human-mediated, and material-storied setting, cannabis emerged as a plant that was full of personality, obviously beautiful and valuable beyond and apart from any drug/product that it might produce. For both researchers, the sensory storytelling enabled us to experience and share in the jouissance of people through their delight in coming to know the plant well, including being able to care for the plants responsively, being able to recognize when a plant was well and to know what to do about it. Participants’ sensory experiences of color, beauty, and touch and their sharing in the relational aspects of cannabis cultivation allowed us to think about cannabis in these sensory ways. Thus, positioned within close familial relationships and every day domestic situations, cannabis emerged as something markedly different from the techno-rational and legal policy framings we were more familiar with as drugs policy researchers. In this new web of relationships, one made of human connections, particular biological realities, and cultural and socioeconomic contexts, the very idea of what cannabis is and might be – shifted, as it emerged as something more than a commodity.

What’s love got to do with it? Feeling, knowing, and affect in cannabis policy

Having come to meet cannabis differently, the way the plant was enacted and accounted for in policy-processes shaping cannabis legislation in Canberra seemed extremely limited, reducing cannabis plants to their drug products and seeking to regulate the plants through this narrow plant-as-drug lens. In our earlier analysis ⁸⁵ we had already suspected that the legislation overlooked much of the reality of growing cannabis. But following this brief yet passionate immersion in cannabis lifeways, the legislation – ostensibly intended to govern the conditions allowing for cannabis cultivation – began to look strikingly barren of a whole world of planty reality; cannabis the plant, with all of its rambunctious charm, simply was not there.

As Tsing notes, love is not separate from knowing, even if, for many natural scientists, a vital condition until recently has been that ‘the love didn’t show’ and that relationships with scientific subjects could be presented as purely ‘rational’. ⁸⁶ As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould notes, love is part of what animates both biological sciences and people’s willingness to fight for particular species. ⁸⁷ Indeed, ethologist Konrad Lorentz argued that regarding science as value-free is a dangerous self-deception, noting that ‘all of the biologists I know are undeniably lovers of their objects of study’. ⁸⁸ Knowing other organisms is, as Jamie Lorimer argues, ‘a passionate and embodied practice’. ⁸⁹ In dismissing the vital importance of sentiment to how we think and care and what we think and care about, we are coming to know such others only in limited ways. ⁹⁰

Loving another is not the only way in which to know it. Indeed, as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa notes, love may be trouble: much violence is carried out in order to protect those one loves. ⁹¹ Holding a love for cannabis does not offer a truer version of cannabis than others, but it does offer an additional lens on its realities, rather than closing them down. While we do not argue that coming to love cannabis – or other currently unloved organisms – is necessarily needed for policy makers, we do argue for the importance of recognizing that feeling and knowing are not separate processes. Providing the means through which to acknowledge the entangled relations through which we come to know other species may be especially important for areas like drug policy where, as previously noted, etymology, history, culture and values have long shaped perceptions, understandings and narratives, and limited the scope of what is deemed acceptable or even possible in terms of policy response. ⁹² Highly constrained ways of recognizing other beings are common across many policy approaches. ⁹³ Without the passionate evidence of those who love an organism told or shown in ways that allows a ‘crack’ through which legislators can meet the being differently, how can it escape ‘commonsense’ framings of organism-as-commodity?

Making space for people to be affected by those or that about which they are legislating potentially has a transformative role in policy given its ability to engage people emotionally and make us care by influencing what we feel, testing moralities, and shifting values. ⁹⁴ In a world where facts and figures may have the opposite intended effect by digging people further into their own beliefs and moral framings, ⁹⁵ affective power has the potential to not only expand the ways we think about things but to also generate empathy and move people. ⁹⁶ The importance of storying for coming to understand has seen story-based methods integrated into a number of policy-making processes, for instance in climate science, where storying has been used to better illustrate impacts of climate change on communities to politicians. ⁹⁷ Storying and truth-telling processes provide a platform for survivors of state based and/or institutional violence to tell their stories and bring to light hidden injustices. ⁹⁸ Durbach documents how local Khulumani workshops in South Africa used drawing and arts practice to share individual and collective memories, stories, ideas, and solutions, with the creative process primarily functioning to ‘register and hold the emotion of participants’ and a form of psychosocial healing process. ⁹⁹

But what kinds of stories can be told, or accepted as credible evidence in policy, and how do they frame the other and our relationships or talk to our entangled and enmeshed ways of knowing and being? Through our experiences we have become curious about what might happen when people are given the power to tell deeply affecting love stories. With illicit organisms in particular, the types of autobiographical reference points that policymakers bring to bear may be muted or restricted in terms of the experiences of jouissance, epiphanies, or even simple aesthetic appreciation, that may help to appreciate another organism. They also tend to have little haptic quality. Traditional policy making processes do not so readily allow for these aspects of ecological charisma to enter into discussion, with plants and other beings tending to remain out of sight and unscented, and with no well-placed human mediators to direct policy makers to such charms. In situations where different objects and realities of drug policy are opened up, diverse knowledges and experiences can be taken into account, as well as different modes of evidencing. ¹⁰⁰ By making space for affective and material stories, policy processes might better account for the beings they seek to govern.

How might policy change in the face of successful meetings? Our research found a legal policy shift that enabled domestic cultivation of cannabis revealed something of the relational charisma of the cannabis plant itself. In as much as contemporary drug policy – and indeed policy work more generally – is shaped by notions of public participation and participation of affected communities, ¹⁰¹ one outcome of our work is to explore the ways in which the cannabis plant itself might participate in these meetings. We are ultimately unable to predict the outcomes when policy decisions are made in the presence of a greater range of beings who are affected by them. However, urges to mastery and control will likely not remain unmoved when a being has been met in their more-than-instrumental charms. Shifts in aesthetic representation constitute a political struggle, as Dixon notes, through the attempt to ‘reconfigure the place not only of particular groups, but also the social order within which they are embedded’. ¹⁰² We are not saying to throw caution to the wind about the affects of cannabis as a drug. Indeed, many of our interviewees held concerns about cannabis as a consumable, particularly for young people. What we are arguing for, instead, is modes of policy making and presencing of others that give a greater range of possibilities for what another being might be.