Transnational Configurations of the Criminalization–Racialization Nexus and the Origins of International Cannabis Prohibitions

Racial disparities in criminal justice are often viewed through a nation-centric lens. The rise of transnational and decolonial approaches in comparative law scholarship provides an opportunity to go beyond this methodologically nationalist perspective and gain a deeper understanding of how processes of criminalization and racialization mutually constitute one another within political spaces that transcend the boundaries of individual jurisdictions. Building on transnational and decolonial premises, this Article develops a theoretical framework for studying how the diffusion of criminal prohibitions interacts with global circulations of racialized discourses and governance practices. This framework traces how racialized bodies of knowledge produced across disciplinary fields become embedded in the normative structures underpinning the enactment of international obligations of criminalization and domestic criminal prohibitions. It considers how such patterns of norm diffusion bear the imprints of colonial encounters and postcolonial entanglements. It also examines how domestic acts of implementing global scripts of criminalization interact with domestic racial formations. The Article uses the developed framework to analyze a case study of the diffusion of cannabis prohibitions across colonial and national jurisdictions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that efforts to promote universal acceptance of international legal norms favoring the criminalization of cannabis use reflected wider historical shifts in how racial knowledge was produced and disseminated during the heyday of scientific racism and eugenics. It considers how the embedding of racist assumptions within criminological and psychiatric bodies of knowledge shaped cannabis policy debates in the League of Nations and in domestic contexts, including the United States. This analysis challenges the conventional narrative that casts the United States as a pioneer of prohibitionist drug policies. It reinterprets the origins of cannabis prohibitions in the United States as part of a transnational discourse straddling the Global North–Global South divide.