Female Stoners: An Ethnographic Study

Female Stoners

An Ethnographic Study

Joelle Baker - December 18, 2013Introduction

I choose to do my ethnographic study on female stoners. They are a subculture of a subculture and are not often recognized as part of society. I hoped to shed some light on the daily lives of female smokers, as well as end further stereotypes associated with this group. During my study I found that female stoners lead relatively normal lives, just it involves smoking marijuana. Further participatory research of the subculture led to some interesting findings on their culture such as rituals, economics, language, taboos, and stereotypes.

I interviewed two women who are self proclaimed stoners.

It was not especially difficult to obtain access to this subcultural because I am a part of it. Though it should be noted that it is not easy to become part of this group due to its illegal nature. Most of the time friendships have to be formed first. Once its deemed that you are trustworthy than people will be more comfortable allowing you to partake in the activity. Stoners will not let outsiders know that they smoke, or even who they hang out with in an effort to protect them from legal action.

The same caution is taken from dealers. Dealers generally not accept new clients out of the blue. Usually a trusted client will recommend a new smoker for the dealer to take on. In other cases they will act like a third party between the dealer and a new client, making the deals so that the dealer does not get physically involved. This protects the dealer from possible sting operations with law enforcement.

Some of the challenges that I faced in my study was the availability of weed. I wanted to

What is a stoner?

To start I feel that it i...

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...n ones allotted hits is looked down upon. The person is made out to be greedy. There are measures of social control to stop these actions such as ostracizing the offender from the group.

Mini-Ethnographic Report

Studying the female stoners I learned to put aside some of the stigmas associated with smoking. It made me more aware that they are normal everyday girls and should not be judged by society. Apart from that I took a deeper look into why girls smoke and found that some use the drug for medical reasons.

Some of the challenges that I faced in conducting my field research was that some of the girls got a little to high and had trouble answering my question. Also it was exceptionally tempting for me to join in the group activities while conducting my research. In fact I had to to do more than the required observations because of this.