How Marijuana Culture Has Changed over Time

   Have you ever wondered just how many of your fellow students used to smoke pot in high school? When I was in high school, getting stoned was very common among the popular kids and the outcasts. In fact, during the time of my high school career, a large survey proved that 27% of students were smoking marijuana across Canada. 

   Back in the sixties, marijuana was just as popular.  In 1969, 22% of college students that were questioned in an anonymous phone survey admitted to regularly using the drug.

   Though some members of these two very different generations seem to share the same love for the plant, the reasons behind this passionate infatuation are completely different. In order to see how these generations differ in opinions, I took to music lyrics. 

   In the 1960s, many musical artists performed songs about marijuana, as they still do today. According to Bob Dylan’s lyrics “I would not feel so alone/Everybody must get stoned,” marijuana connected people. Most hippies, the predominating crowd of 1960s youth culture, believed that marijuana connected them with one another on a psychic level. They believed that it helped them share love with each other and connect on a spiritual plane according to some of their new age beliefs.

Some hippies just hanging out

   As the band Ten Years After once wrote: “She ganna love him, stoned out of mind all the time.” Marijuana was often seen as a creative tool (be it for art, sex, or conversation) back in the 1960s. It was used as a way to expand consciousness. Even Patti Smith uses marijuana in “Just Kids” in order to create poetry.

   Fast forward to the 21^st century, and it seems the reasons for smoking pot have changed for the most part. Weed is now treated in a much more material sense. Rather than using it as a tool for connection, some youth from the Millennial Generation now use it as a status symbol and therefore as a way to stand out from each other. The better your weed, the cooler you are, the more you stand apart from your peers.

  

A$AP Rocky, a popular artist among Generation Y

  The perfect example of this is in Lil Wayne’s song Ice Cream Paint Job when he explains “Kush so strong you can smell me coming.” He is implying that his weed is so strong that others are noticing him.  Lil Wayne, along with the other members of YMCMB dominate in today’s pop-culture and are simply mirroring a concept that has become very popular among many youth nowadays. It seems that weed is now judged by some similarly to money; the more weed you have, the higher some people think of you. A$AP Rocky, another popular rapper among the Millennials has a song called “Pussy, Weed, Money,” perhaps an even better example of how marijuana is viewed by some nowadays. These three categories are all abused in the same way within some groups of my generation. They are three different ways to make yourself look good and stand out from the crowd, something that many youth want.

   

   All in all, marijuana can be used in many different ways, but some of my generation seems to be using it for mainly negative reasons. Funny how a substance that once connected youth now separates some. Perhaps things would be different if it was legalized. Until then, we shall never know. 

Come on already!