Becker - Becoming a Marihuana User

When I wrote Becoming a Marihuana User in the early 1950s, you couldnt use the substance legally anywhere in the United States, although you could certainly use it. And many people did. It wasnt, at the time, a Social Evil which deserved a place in the Social Problems course every sociology department taught. Crime, mental illness, gangs... things like that were social problems. But relatively few people used marijuana and they didnt make a lot of trouble, so despite the efforts of some authorities, no public was crying out to get rid of the practice.

Because no one cared much about it, no government agencies gave scientists money to study it, and there was almost no scientific literature about it. Opiate addiction, on the other hand, had produced the junkie, a social type whose craving for his drug led him to commit crimes. Most people, especially experts, thought junkies activities were caused by moral depravity or mental illness. Alfred Lindesmith, an alumnus of the University of Chicago Sociology Department in the generation preceding mine, wrote Opiate Addiction (1947), a book attributing opiate addiction, instead, to the users learning to think of the drug as something he had to take to avoid seriously unpleasant physical symptoms. The problem lay in the users interpretation of the effects of the drugs withdrawal.

Lindesmiths book gave me a new way to think about marijuana. I knew that marijuana didnt cause any such untoward symptoms as addiction. And I liked the idea of understanding the characteristic getting high experience not as an unmediated pharmacologically induced event, but rather as the result of users interpretations of those effects. They could have interpreted them differently and had a different experience. And I knew where to find the people with whom I could check my ideas out. I was also lucky enough to find a research institute staffed by Chicago-trained sociologists who, while they could not see the importance of such a project, were willing to pay me half-time to pursue it.

So I did a lot of interviews, a certain amount of irregular and unplanned observation, and wrote an article I planned to submit to a sociological journal. No one was much interested in my article. When I presented the paper at a meeting of the Midwest Sociological Association, no more than a dozen people showed up to hear it and the questions they asked when I was through made clear how much it puzzled them. No one could see the point of doing such an odd thing. And I didnt myself see how my findings could be broadened to account for a much wider range of experiences, a job I did later in a paper that ended up as chapter four of What About Mozart? What About Murder?

Fast forward to the mid-1960s. Several things had changed in the interim. Middle-class youth, especially college students, had begun smoking marijuana, and the grown-ups were worried. I no sooner arrived at Northwestern University as a new professor in 1965 than a bunch of NU students were arrested for possession of marijuana and I was in demand as an expert on what had suddenly become a real problem. This development had several consequences no one could have predicted in 1953.

With a much larger demand emerging, and with some of the users now more highly educated, it was almost inevitable that their number would include some agricultural entrepreneurs willing to do a little experimental plant breeding and hybridization and so produce a product with a higher content of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in the plant that produced the desired psychedelic effect (the fancier term now applied to getting high).

My article said that you had to learn to be high. The new hybrids, with a higher THC content, produced a stronger experience, one that anyone using the drug in the prescribed way would have trouble not recognizing as something happening. Did that mean my idea was, after all, wrong? Two British sociological researchers clearly thought so:

One man, an experienced drug user, summarised for us one of the key issues. Becker had suggested that novices need to learn to experience the effects. What was his own experience?

Perceive the effects??? Wow (prolonged laughter). The effects were just... WHAM!!!... like a hammer at the back of the head... that guy Becker should change his dealer.

Does that constitute a refutation of my idea? I dont think it does. Heres the reasoning. My original statement hadnt said you wouldnt recognize that something was happening. You might well recognize that you were hungry, but say to yourself, Well, big deal, Ive been hungry before, nothing special about that. It might take someone pointing out that you were eating your third hamburger before you agreed that maybe the drug had, after all, had some effect. So learning to be high doesnt mean just recognizing that something is occurring, though thats part of it. It also means seeing (understanding, connecting, choose your own verb) that this is what the drug ingested does, which is never obvious, because other interpretations are always possible. Some of Lindesmiths interviewees told him that they had been addicted to heroin before but hadnt known it. Didnt they feel the characteristic withdrawal symptoms on that earlier occasion? Yes, they did. But theyd been in an automobile accident, so of course they had pain as they were recovering.

The new increased potency of marijuana taught me that the physiological effects of a drug were important in the interpretive process that produced being high, but that didnt guarantee that everyone would interpret them the same way, no matter how obvious that interpretation might seem to some other folks.

The spread of marijuana smoking to larger and more varied populations produced a second result. More people could interpret the signs smoking dope produced, so the chance that new users would find someone to explain their actions, and the results of those actions, meant that more new users already had a good idea of what to expect, a full complement of definitional aids to what was going to happen. Many people spoke, in those early days, of the development of a drug culture, an elaborate collection of personal habits (e.g., long hair for men), political beliefs (e.g., a vague version of anarchism resulting in universal peace and love), sexual practices and understandings (the precursors of todays custom of getting married only after a year or two of what would have been called not so long ago living in sin), and marijuana (rather than alcohol) as the drug of choice.