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Since the late 1990s, marijuana grow operations have been identified by media and others as a new and dangerous criminal activity of "epidemic" proportions. With Killer Weed, Susan C. Boyd and Connie Carter use their analysis of fifteen years of newspaper coverage to show how consensus about the dangerous people and practices associated with marijuana cultivation was created and disseminated by numerous spokespeople including police, RCMP, and the media in Canada. The authors focus on the context of media reports in British Columbia to show how claims about marijuana cultivation have intensified the perception that this activity poses "significant" dangers to public safety and thus is an appropriate target for Canada's war on drugs. Boyd and Carter carefully show how the media draw on the same spokespeople to tell the same story again and again, and how a limited number of messages has led to an expanding anti-drug campaign that uses not only police, but BC Hydro and local municipalities to crack down on drug production. Going beyond the newspapers, Killer Weed examines how legal, political, and civil initiatives that have emerged from the media narrative have troubling consequences for a shrinking Canadian civil society

AbstractThe unprecedented tragedy of Hurricane Katrina produced unprecedented data for studying the impacts of natural disasters. The current paper looks at one public health outcome of this event: direct flood deaths in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes of Louisiana. In particular, the risk of death for the flood‐exposed population is estimated, mapped, and discussed. Of the nearly 1,500 deaths that Louisiana officially counts as Katrina deaths, approximately 600 are determined to be associated with exposure to floodwaters. Additionally, it is estimated that approximately 63,000 persons were exposed to floodwaters. The ratio of flood deaths to flood‐exposed population, termed the flood fatality rate, provides an empirical measure of flood risk. Georeferenced datasets on both the flood deaths and the flood‐exposed population are developed, and then used to estimate and map the flood fatality rate. For the overall event, the flood fatality rate is estimated to be 7 11 deaths per 1,000 persons exposed, which is consistent with other coastal flood disasters. At the blockgroup level, the highest values of the flood fatality rate are observed in the Lower Ninth Ward, while comparatively lower values are observed in New Orleans East. A preliminary univariate regression model with water depth as the independent variable is presented, and applied to Hurricane Gustav, which impacted the region in August 2008.

This article provides an analysis of the Canadian full-length feature film High, produced in 1967. It also briefly examines early drug regulation and fictive illegal drug films with a focus on representations of marijuana and women. High captures societal tensions of the 1960s, including women's liberation, counter-culture lifestyles, and marijuana use. Yet it also re-enacts discourse and symbolic frameworks about white women, marijuana, law, and crime. White women's marijuana use is represented as a threat to gender-appropriate norms, respectability, and, ultimately, the family and nation. These frameworks and understandings of marijuana appear to be quite enduring, informing the production of film, policing, law, and the continued regulation of women.