CHICAGO JOURNALS Becoming a Marihuana User Author(s): Howard S. Becker Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Nov., 1953), pp. 235-242 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2771989 Accessed: 22/08/2010 11:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Journal of Sociology. STOR ® http://www.jstor.org
BECOMING A MARIHUANA USER* HOWARD S. BECKER ABSTRACT An individual will be able to use marihuana for pleasure only when he (1) learns to smoke it in a way that will produce real effects; (2) learns to recognize the effects and connect them with drug use; and (3) learns to enjoy the sensations he perceives. This proposition, based on an analysis of fifty interviews with marihuana users, calls into question theories which ascribe behavior to antecedent predispositions and suggests the utility of explaining behavior in terms of the emergence of motives and dispositions in the course of experi- ence. The use of marihuana is and has been the focus of a good deal of attention on the part of both scientists and laymen. One of the major problems students of the practice have addressed themselves to has been the identification of those individual psycholog- ical traits which differentiate marihuana users from nonusers and which are assumed to account for the use of the drug. That ap- proach, common in the study of behavior categorized as deviant, is based on the prem- ise that the presence of a given kind of be- havior in an individual can best be ex- plained as the result of some trait which pre- disposes or motivates him to engage in the behavior.1 that the presence of a given kind of behavior is the result of a sequence of social experi- ences during which the person acquires a conception of the meaning of the behavior, and perceptions and judgments of objects and situations, all of which make the activ- ity possible and desirable. Thus, the motiva- tion or disposition to engage in the activity is built