Citation

London-Nadeau K, Lafortune C, Gorka C, Lemay-Gaulin M, D'Alessio H, Bristowe S, Castellanos Ryan N. Int. J. Drug Policy 2024; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.drugpo.2024.104506

PMID

38937198

Abstract

We are writing this commentary from the perspectives of queer and trans (QT) youth with several years of experience working in drug policy and harm reduction, notably through the youth-led organization Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy (and its cannabis education campaign, Get Sensible) and the Cannabis & Psychosis project of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada. This work has shaped our understanding of harm reduction as a political and structural philosophy prioritizing the human rights and agency of people who use different substances (Erickson, 1995). As all but one of the QT youth authors writing this commentary are affiliated with a university, our work has also been shaped by our privilege of academic positioning, having received academic training in public health, psychology, medicine, and Indigenous and Social Justice and Gender Equity studies. This access allowed us to carry out our community-led research project, which aimed to capture different ways that cannabis features in our communities through interviews with 27 QT youth living in Québec. While six of us (with the guidance of the project's supervisor, Dr. Castellanos Ryan) are writing this piece, fifteen QT youth were involved in the project's conception, execution, and dissemination. Below, we provide a brief group reflection on this process, examining the barriers, challenges, limitations and opportunities involved in leading community- and QT youth-led cannabis research projects within academia. We first situate this work within the pathologization that has been imposed upon our communities, and our aim to disrupt these conceptions while simultaneously seeking to foreground a variety of QT youth experiences with cannabis use. We then explore the contradictions of seeking to conduct work aligned with QT liberation within academic frameworks, describing how we chose to operate both within and outside of these structures.

Language: en

Keywords

Cannabis; Youth; Harm reduction; Queer and trans