Paper: Drug policy stasis and hegemonic narratives of cannabis in Nigeria

Nigeria has been one of the most outspoken opponents of drug policy reform globally, especially in the field of cannabis. At annual meetings of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), Nigerian representatives often act as key ‘defenders’ of the prohibitionist approach (Bewley-Taylor, 2012; IDPC, 2024). While there have been important drug policy changes in Nigeria over the last 10 years, especially on harm reduction (Nelson, 2024a), its cannabis policy has been static, as it has continued to prioritise drug law enforcement and severe punishments including for cannabis possession and use (Klantschnig, 2016). In this respect, Nigeria differs from other African countries, such as Ghana and Zimbabwe, which have embraced policy reforms and liberalised cannabis policy of late (Rusenga et al., 2024a). Nevertheless, policy changes elsewhere have not gone unnoticed in Nigeria. Our article explores how global and regional policy changes can affect countries that have held on to the prohibitionist approach.

While drug policy is in flux in many countries, cannabis policy stasis, i.e. the persistence of state policies and laws on cannabis, remains widespread (Corva & Meisel, 2021; Nougier & Fernandez, 2021; Rusenga et al., 2024b). This article explores some of the dynamics that have helped to maintain policy stasis, especially as approaches change nearby and globally. To make our argument, we focus on narrative processes underlying policy stasis and specifically the role of conservative narratives and their hegemonic impact in policy debates. Our article presents the diversity of existing narratives on cannabis policy in Nigeria, including reform-oriented ones, and highlights the role of hegemonic narratives, i.e. dominant and often unquestioned policy stories that legitimise existing power structures (Lejano et al., 2018). We argue that the latter play a critical role in resisting actual policy reform, while we acknowledge other political and institutional factors that also contribute to this stasis. Further elaborations on the theoretical constructs used in this article are provided below.

Methodologically, the article explores a wide range of policy narratives, i.e. stories that simplify complex policy issues to persuade decision-makers and the public of specific policy choices (Mintrom & Connor, 2020). This includes narratives produced from the top, i.e. by policy officials, contrasting them with alternative ones produced from below, i.e. by users, traders and producers of cannabis, who are often excluded from research and public debates. Through this narrative analysis of cannabis policy, we highlight the role of hegemonic narratives and how they are adapted to changing policy contexts (including global changes) and how they help maintain policy stasis. This resistance to reform is based on country-specific institutional reasons already explored in previous research (Klantschnig, 2016; Nelson, 2021), however, we argue that policy stasis is also maintained by powerful conservative narratives opposing reform, which are not just prevalent in Nigeria but in other countries in the region and beyond (Cohen & Klantschnig, 2022). The article explores how this drug policy conservativism works on the narrative level, how it stays hegemonic and adapts to shifts in global cannabis policy.

In the following, we first situate our study in the emerging literature on drug policy narratives before setting out the methods and data used. We then explore three major themes that surfaced from the data (representations of cannabis; pro-reform narratives; resistance to change) and bring these themes together to discuss the role of drug policy narratives and especially how hegemonic narratives help to maintain policy stasis.

By studying the role of drug policy narratives, our study aims to contribute to a growing literature on narrative analysis. This field of research has emerged across various disciplines over the last 15 years, such as policy analysis, drug policy studies and criminology (Fleetwood et al., 2019; Ritter, 2021, 89–103; Kuenzler et al., 2025). In line with early work in the field (Ewick & Silbey, 1995; Jones & McBeth, 2010, 333–337), we take a consciously constructionist approach and aim to qualitatively study the role of narratives and language in shaping the construction of policy problems in specific contexts (Lancaster, 2014).

We adopt narrative analysis based on the understanding that policy solutions arise from the ways problems are constructed through narratives (MacGregor, 2013). Narrative analysis reveals the ‘way a problem is framed, who is involved in framing the problem and the rhetorical techniques used in influencing those in the policy arena’ (Fitzgerald, 2013, 80). The emphasis on language and social construction distinguishes narrative analysis from alternative, epistemologically more substantivist, approaches such as agenda setting, strategic behaviours of policy actors and institutional analysis. Although our topic could be explored through any of these other approaches, narrative analysis is well suited to highlight the discursive strategies through which policy problems and solutions are constructed, which is the focus of our study. It also enables us to go beyond institutional contexts to explore drug policies from the perspective of key actors and how they construct meanings based on their experiences with policies, thus revealing the beliefs and values that shape responses to policy problems (Rhodes, 2018).

Past research has shown that the power of narratives is based on how they explain complex policy issues in the form of stories. These stories frame policy processes in simple and convincing ways, often highlighting a policy problem (e.g. illicit cannabis farming), some key characters responsible for it (e.g. organised crime groups), as well as a relatively clear-cut policy solution (e.g. law enforcement), drawing on well-established storylines. These policy narratives are rarely complete reflections of a policy issue and the absence of certain elements – ‘the unsaid’- is critical for analysing them fully (Autessere, 2012; Presser, 2019). Lancaster, Seear and Ritter (2017), in their work on official discourses on medicinal cannabis highlight the discursive strategies taken to legitimise certain uses of cannabis (e.g. under medical supervision) while delegitimising others (e.g. recreational cannabis smoking), and the exclusion of some key issues (e.g. the role of pleasure) from these narratives. Exclusion of alternative views has arguably been a key underlying process of Nigerian and many other African countries’ drug policies over the last 50 years (Klantschnig, 2016; Mustapha, 2002; Obot, 2004), although this has rarely been explored on the narrative level.

The exclusion of some issues and voices also points to the role of dominant narratives in drug policy debates. Susan MacGregor emphasises the role of key narratives dominating the UK drug policy debate, which have made it difficult to change policy, unless an external event or crisis disrupts the debate. These dominant narratives have polarised the debate, making drug policy a politically sensitive issue for reform-minded actors. Considering the role of research evidence in this context, MacGregor describes the drugs debate as a ‘battlefield’ where ‘evidence is used as ammunition in these battles’ (MacGregor, 2013, 2). While evidence on drugs plays a relatively minor role in Nigerian cannabis policy (and it is arguably the perceived lack of evidence that has helped to uphold policy stasis as we will argue below), it is the polarised set-up of the debate as a ‘battlefield’ of narratives that clearly resonates with the Nigerian situation.

Whilst there is some narrative research on policy change, few scholars have dealt with the narrative dynamics behind drug policy stasis. As Hughes et al. (2017) have argued, research on policy persistence has mostly focussed on the international drug control system (Bewley-Taylor, 2012; Room, 1999; also see Herschinger, 2010), which significantly differs from national contexts. John Fitzgerald’s (2013) work on safe drug injection facilities indirectly touches on narrative dynamics behind policy stasis when contrasting experiences in two Australian states. The author argues that policy change only occurred when narratives included the issue of police corruption that helped to side-track the polarised debate between prohibitionist and harm reduction proponents. While this sheds light on the move away from policy stasis, the narrative dynamics of stasis itself remain somewhat unclear. Furthermore, Lejano et al. (2018), in a more conceptual contribution on drug policy narratives, proposes the notion of hegemonic policy narrative, inspired by Gramsci’s work on hegemonic power. A hegemonic policy narrative does not only dominate but it pervades debate and is often taken-for-granted (Ewick & Silbey, 1995, 212), as we will find with the ‘cannabis as dangerous drug’ narrative in the Nigerian case. Nevertheless, such hegemonic narratives can still be contested and replaced over time by strong alternative narratives, as has been the case in the field of drug harm reduction reforms in Nigeria as elsewhere (Nelson, 2024a).

In addition to these largely top-down analyses prevalent in the policy analysis and drug policy literatures, recent work in narrative criminology offers a more bottom-up addition, as it aims to foreground narratives of marginalised and criminalised actors and thus challenges dominant state narratives on drugs and drug policy (Ewick & Silbey, 1995; Fleetwood et al., 2019). Boonzaier (2019) also argues that there is need to contextualise both dominant and marginalised narratives to bring out the often-hidden dynamics of power they reproduce. While not without its own limitations (Bunn, 2023), the utility of this work for our study is to bring in the voices of those excluded from policy debates (e.g. illicit farmers, traders and users) and to contrast them with, as well as challenge, top-down narratives on drug policy.

Overall, little research has been conducted on drug policy narratives, especially in the African context. Studies on drug policy change in Africa are already rare – most of them focussing on drug harm reduction or legal aspects of policy reform (e.g. Ratliff et al., 2016; Rhodes & Abdool, 2016; Rusenga et al., 2024a). The dearth of narrative policy research reflects this wider research gap. The few existing analyses exploring narratives focus on global influences on Africa, such as foreign drug war narratives (Carrier & Klantschnig, 2012; Nelson, 2021, 2022), or on other non-drug policy fields (Autessere, 2012; van Bavel et al., 2024). As such, the article’s contributions are, first, to add a needed West African perspective on cannabis policy reform; second, to empirically ground this perspective in the voices of policy actors as well as currently marginalised illicit market insiders and, third, to conceptually advance our understanding of drug policy narratives, including the role of hegemonic narratives and how they help to uphold drug policy stasis.