Marijuana: The new "it" drug.t

As one reads Howard Becker's article on Marijuana use or Marihuana, one is immediately placed in a a position that Pot is a very acceptable drug and is the common place. His article is very relaxed and the language of the article I feel is targeted toward the culture of current users, or those that are curious about the drug and looking to try it. Position: This is what the article is trying to make you change or reinforce your beliefs to.

Culture is the cumulation of everything we have experienced in our lives and essentially defines who we are and why we tick. Essentially, in his article the culture is the terminology and language, how you are supposed to feel when high is one. He describes in detail the individual that didn't have a clue how to smoke pot and observed the behaviors of others and the way the other individual smoked. The emphasis was on how he watched someone breathe it in, it wasn't like tobacco where you breathe as normal, but you take long winded inhales of the drug in order to get the effective dose into your body.

A concept that we discussed in a class that I have taken is that a drugs effects are largely dependent on what the user expects to happen. When a group of individuals got high they would ask subtle questions on how they were feeling or other reactions from the experienced drug users, this is how they learned to get high.

Again tying into the learned behaviors is inter-textuality. This is something that is common to many different subsets of groups and social groups. In almost any sub-groups of society we are all outsiders and typically we are observers for a while to learn what is appropriate, what is not, and all sorts of other verbal and non-verbal cues that we must effectively learn in order to fit in with different types of people.