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BECOMING A MARIHUANA USER. A SOCIOLOGICAL LOOK Howard Becker is an American sociologist born in 1928, he belongs to the “second Chicago school” and, among his most outstanding works, is Becoming a Marihuana User. This work was published in 1953, in the context of an American society not open to discussing legalization. Although the author himself calls for a responsible use of the term “context” so as not to fall into the simplistic generalization that marijuana consumers engage in this practice due to problematic “contexts”, it is imperative to recognize the society that received this work. In the 1950s, American society was concerned about
Humberto Orígenes Romero Porras Holds a degree in history from the Universidad de Guadalajara. A former Paralympic athlete (20062017), he won a medal at the 2015 Parapan American Games held in Toronto, Canada. A partisan of worthy causes, he is interested in the interconnections between history, literature, and soccer.
“crime, mental illness, gangs: things like these were social problems. But relatively few people used marijuana and it didn’t cause too much disruption, so despite the efforts of some authorities, no section of public opinion was clamoring to be rid of the practice.” By the 1960s, marijuana use was widespread among middle-class college students. Among them, some enterprising farmers decided to experiment with growing weed, in the purest style of Savages, the 2012 film directed by Oliver Stone. It is easy to imagine young Californians trying to be enterprising and have fun. In Becker’s historical context, the use of opiates already existed, which gave rise to the word Junkie, which, incidentally, is the name of a novel by William S. Burroughs, an author of the Beat Generation, a subject that is beyond the scope of this article. The use of these substances was studied a few years before the publication of Becker’s study on marijuana by a colleague of his in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, Alfred Lindesmith, who wrote Opiate Addiction (1947), a book that “attributed addiction to opiates to the fact that the consumer got the idea that he had to take the drug to avoid intensely displeasing physical symptoms.” It was clear to Howard Becker that marijuana did not produce these symptoms, so he decided to think of it as non-addictive. He interviewed several university students and discovered that “a good trip” depends on the interpretation of the traveler, so that the same experience, interpreted differently, leads to different sensations. Becker starts from the conceptualization of what he calls “deviance studies”, to present the marijuana user as someone who does not live with a psychological pathology, but who has become a “deviant” for
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