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The medicalisation of marijuana has occurred rapidly, albeit nonuniformly, across the US and around the world over the past 3 decades. This paper centres on the medicalisation of marijuana in Minnesota—which has one of the most restrictive programs in the country—as a case for evaluating the negotiation of institutional boundaries with the shift from criminalisation to medicalisation after nearly a century of criminal prohibition. Drawing upon Foucauldian discourse analyses of the medical and law enforcement associations' position statements and legislative hearings that shaped medical marijuana policy in Minnesota, this paper demonstrates a symbiotic convergence between medicine and law enforcement through the deployment of shared discursive strategies in their opposition to medical marijuana that reinforce marijuana's criminalised status by solidifying the boundaries between proper medicine and dangerous drugs. Criminal justice and medical institutions draw upon one another's definitions, logics, and practices in a mutually constitutive manner, while still maintaining distinct user subjects and institutional interventions for each based on the user's access to state‐approved forms of marijuana. The consequences for the governing of marijuana in Minnesota are explored, as well as the broader implications for the sociological study of medicalisation and criminalisation with respect to the governance of drugs and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of sentencing policy in the adjoining, and demographically and culturally similar, states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Using administrative data, together with historical and legal analyses of sentencing policy in each state, it (1) argues that the destabilization of the penal order represented a critical juncture during which commission‐based, presumptive sentencing guidelines were an option in both states; (2) analyzes how the decision to adopt this guidelines system in Minnesota and the failure to do so in Wisconsin initiated path‐dependent processes, making it difficult to reverse the initial policy choice; and (3) assesses how these distinct policy paths led to different penal outcomes. A concluding section discusses how analyses of path dependency shed light on the state variation in sentencing policy and provide a framework for assessing the possibilities of, and obstacles to, penal reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]