I first smoked weed in college, along with maybe half or more of my contemporaries. If memory serves, it was barely more than 24 hours after I moved into my tiny dorm room and unpacked my duffel bag. Paul, my best friend from high school, new college roommate, and partner in crime, was also a marijuana virgin. He scored a couple of joints the day after move-in, and we decided to take the illicit plunge that evening.
We weren’t totally naïve. We’d both attended parties where, in cross-legged circles on the floor, joints were passed around amongst friends. But Paul and I always graciously opted not to partake and were never pressured. My hesitance was fear-based: fear of the law, of being stigmatized, of my parents, of altering my brain chemistry and DNA. Besides, I wasn’t the type of kid who did bad things like drugs—especially when authorities were saying weed was a gateway to ruinous addictions.
Paul and I didn’t need to get high to get paranoid. When the time came to light up, we blocked the gap at the bottom of our door with towels so the smell wouldn’t escape to the hallway. We spoke in hushed tones and giggled like bad little schoolboys.
We smoked a single joint. Our room fogged up like the inside of Cheech and Chong’s Chevy Impala in the movie Up in Smoke—the acrid haze of forbidden sin.
I felt quite woozy by the time we were down to the roach. It wasn’t necessarily a “high” feeling, either. More like oxygen deprivation with a hint of nausea. But we admitted no such interpretations and acted as though we were very high. For all I knew, we were. I had nothing to compare it to.
Being honest with myself, I was already questioning my nascent affiliation with recreational drug use. As much fun as we had doing it, it just didn’t feel very good. I gave it a few more chances over the days to follow, but it never grabbed me, and I just stopped. It was probably five years or more before I even tried it again, with similar results.
Not so for Paul. In the weeks following our first experiments, he and the wacky tobacky became BFFs. He also changed. He’d party every night, stumble back to our room in the wee hours, needlessly and rudely disturbing my sleep. Snoring through his alarm in the morning, he’d miss classes and accuse me of sabotaging the clock so he’d oversleep. In these and many other ways I’d rather not recall, he became the Roommate from Hell.
Paul and I began college with very similar backgrounds, experiences, personalities, and dispositions. And yet, by the end of that first semester, we couldn’t stand one another. We moved apart as soon as the opportunity arose, and never repaired our friendship.
Why did Paul, and not I, become a stoner or, if you will, a reefer hobbyist?
That very semester, a reading assignment in my Introduction to Sociology course helped answer this question. The article was a classic by Howard S. Becker: “Becoming a Marijuana User.”
Becker posited a three-part sequence for what the uninitiated must do before identifying as a user, smoker, pothead, stoner, doper, midnight toker, etc.:
The prospective marijuana user must learn to
- Smoke in a way that produces real effects
- Recognize the effects
- Enjoy the effects
It’s conceivable that one could learn these subtle skills through trial and error. But in Becker’s view, that would be the hard way. It’s much more efficient to learn from others—to be taught by others.
My only relevant experiences were with Paul. Between my girlfriend, a full course load, and a work ethic spurred by a lack of confidence in my academic abilities, I had little spare time for socializing or other recreational activities.
Meanwhile, Paul, who was a bit more gregarious than I, was being educated by a whole new set of friends who bonded over weed. They taught him the best smoking methods, how to interpret his sensations, and how to derive maximum pleasure from his cannabis consumption. Within a month, he completed Weed 101 with flying colors, whereas I flunked out well before the midterm exam.
This is probably why, with Paul’s marijuana support system in high gear and mine nonexistent, our freshman year experiences diverged so markedly.
Today, not only can the weed-curious access unlimited sources of internet “knowledge” (scare-quotes intended), but also, social and legal impediments to marijuana use have been all but erased since the days of my tentative first puffs.
While the social and legal climates have changed, Becker’s teaching and learning process has not. Becoming a marijuana user is still a highly social experience, even if not enacted face-to-face in smoky basements and dorm rooms. Nowadays, the training regimen is supplemented via tutorials on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Even Business Insider offers a methodological primer.
Now for the big reveal: This post is not really about using marijuana. As hinted in the title, it’s about becoming a hobbyist, which, as defined in my previous post, entails any activity that imparts meaning and pleasure to participants.
In the next installment, I’ll home in on a more conventional hobby, expose its sources of meaning and joy, and argue that analyzing it this way only enhances the pleasures it brings.