BECOMING A MARIHUANA USER by Howard Saul Becker ( 9780226332901 )

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Title:

BECOMING A MARIHUANA USER

By:

Howard Saul Becker

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Paperback

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ISBN 10:

022633290X

ISBN 13:

9780226332901

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Publisher:

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Pub. date:

6 July, 2015

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Description:

Among Howard Becker s favorite quotes is one he coined management is a one-word oxymoron and another uttered by Ambrose Bierce I think I think, therefore I think I am. His distrust of authority and convention is already apparent from the first, and his belief that things (or facts ) don t carry their meaning on their faces, but are relative to an observer and the observer s community, comes through in the second. His reputation as a maverick was firmly established more than 60 years ago when he published, in The American Journal of Sociology, Becoming a Marihuana User. He gets fan mail about this piece even now, six decades later (e.g., from a British manager of a criminal justice/drug rehab center, who insists that his volunteers and new employees read the article, even though a good few years have past and patterns of drug use have greatly changed, [but] this chapter like the vast majority of your work remains relevant and highly useful ). Smoking marijuana, still against the law in most places, is therefore deviant, and instead of asking why do they break universally accepted rules, for Becker marijuana is simply a substance whose use someone has outlawed. The question of how a choice is made to use it thus becomes a focus of study. And so, smoking marijuana is an experience one learns to enjoy: The taste for such experience is a socially acquired one, not different in kind from acquired tastes for oysters or dry martinis. The user acquires a stable set of categories for registering the drug s effects. Becker shows the steps by which the user acquires these categories from others in his marijuana-smoking world. Becker s new preface addresses the fact that marihuana over the past 60 years has become more accepted, thus more widely used, and that the cultivation of the plant has resulted in increased potency. Do people still have to learn how to get high? Yes, but there are some intricacies. And there are ironies; in some quarters, people think the 1953 article is the beginning point of the gradual revolution in acceptance of pot smoking (Becker knows better), and he wryly observes that people at first didn t know what to make of the article or of his conference presentations until, thanks to a police bust of several Northwestern students a decade or so later (where he was teaching), Becker all of a sudden became an expert. Nowadays, he is being celebrated as the Voice of Sociology, thanks to a wonderful write-up in The New Yorker magazine of his life as a jazz musician, scholar, and Chicagoan (at least for his first 50 years), and of his fame in French circles as the anti-Bourdieu and avatar of empiricism."

Synopsis:

OG Kush. Sour Diesel. Wax, shatter, and vapes. Marijuana has come a long way since its seedy days in the back parking lots of our culture. So has Howard S. Becker, the eminent sociologist, jazz musician, expert on "deviant" culture, and founding NORML board member. When he published Becoming a Marihuana User more than sixty years ago, hardly anyone paid attention-because few people smoked pot. Decades of Cheech and Chong films, Grateful Dead shows, and Cannabis Cups later, and it's clear-marijuana isn't just an established commodity, it's an entire culture. And that's just the thing-Becker totally called it: pot has everything to do with culture. It's not a blight on culture, but a culture itself-in fact, you'll see in this book the first use of the term "users," rather than "abusers" or "addicts." Come along on this short little study-now a famous timestamp in weed studies-and you will be astonished at how relevant it is to us today. Becker doesn't judge, but neither does he holler for legalization, tell you how to grow it in a hollowed-out dresser, or anything else like that for which there are plenty of other books you can buy.Instead, he looks at marijuana with a clear sociological lens-as a substance that some people enjoy, and that some others have decided none of us should. From there he asks: so how do people decide to get high, and what kind of experience do they have as a result of being part of the marijuana world? What he discovers will bother some, especially those who proselytize the irrefutably stunning effects of the latest strain: chemistry isn't everything-the important thing about pot is how we interact with it. We learn to be high. We learn to like it. And from there, we teach others, passing the pipe in a circle that begins to resemble a bona fide community, defined by shared norms, values, and definitions just like any other community. All throughout this book, you'll see the intimate moments when this transformation takes place. You'll see people doing it for the first time and those with considerable experience. You'll see the early signs of the truths that have come to define the marijuana experience: that you probably won't get high at first, that you have to hold the hit in, and that there are other people here who are going to smoke that, too.

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University of Chicago Press

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