Connecting Keywords to Pot

In Howard Beckers article on how to become a pot smoker, we learn about a specific culture or maybe we should call it subculture. This subculture is made up of the people who smoke marijuana on a regular basis. These people are still part of the culture that they are in, in this case I believe that it was a Chicago culture, but they have kind of made a culture of their own. The culture of marijuana smokers within their original culture. This article basically lays out how any one of us could suddenly become a pot smoker and join this subculture. The article acts as an object for us to study the culture. Pot is a very important part of this culture so it is an object within the culture. There were many subjects in this article who are members of this subculture, pot-users, who were interviewed to provide inside information on what it's like to smoke marijuana, and how to become a pot smoker. To become a pot smoker you basically have to learn how to smoke it in order to get high, you must talk to fellow pot smokers to learn what it feels like to be high, and you must learn to enjoy the feeling. This kind of reminded me of what it takes to start a new sport. First you must learn how to play the game, than you have to learn what it feels like to be part of a team, and than you must learn to enjoy playing the game. If you don't learn all of these things you will not want to continue playing the sport because you won't like it. In the same way people who become pot smokers have to learn how to love what they are doing or they won't continue. Marijuana is not addictive, the only thing that is addictive is the act of doing the drug. People begin to enjoy the people that they are smoking with and they like the actual act of smoking so they continue to do it. In the same way that a soccer player keeps playing because he or she loves the game and his or her teammates. Another thing that I noticed while I was reading this article was quite a bit of intertextuality. The pot smokers that were being interviewed all talked in similar ways. They all used a lot of "likes" and "you knows" making them sound undereducated and in some ways kind of trashy. This made me, as the reader, take a position against marijuana use because I linked it to trashy people. Everyone takes a position when they are reading, looking at, or watching something. Sometimes we don't even know that we are taking a position it just sort of happens.