Becoming a Marihuana User

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.