H1: Individual marijuana use will increase with the number of friends who use marijuana H2: Individual marijuana use will increase with peer- group acceptance of marijuana use Mauss situates marijuana experimentation within the context of college preparation, arguing that many university-bound high school students begin use before matriculating to assist in the cultural assimilation process . Conversely, Brown finds that college students cease marijuana use following graduation, citing social pressures of work, family, and social integration as key causal factors . Yamaguchi and Kandel use cross-sectional event history analysis to demonstrate that marijuana use is negatively related to marriage and becoming a parent, yet positively related with separation/divorce. Since this study’s sample will consist entirely of marijuana users, I expect that the average level of education will be higher than the general population, and that more individuals will be single and childless than the general population.Do licensed medical marijuana users differ from their illegal counterparts in their rationalizations for using the drug? The universe of possible reactions to marijuana are multifaceted and, often, mutually contradictory; Goode’s qualitative study of users illustrates this phenomenon well . Reinarman et al. provide the lone scholarly attempt at identifying characteristics of medical marijuana users .
Using a sample of 1746 patients from nine separate medical marijuana clinics in California, the authors find that Blacks and Native Americans use at higher rates than other ethnic groups, while Latinos and Asians have lower rates of use . Use is heaviest in the 25 44 year age range, and males made up 73% of the sample. Chronic pain suppression and improved sleep were the most commonly cited uses/benefits of marijuana reported by subjects . Other conditions/uses of medical marijuana included relaxation, muscle spasms , headaches , anxiety , nausea , and depression . Studies of non-medical use suggest two dominant views by users: 1) the drug is perceived to stimulate creative thinking,cannabis grow equipment particularly among artists, musicians, and writers, and 2) users consume it to relax and experience euphoria. Weil et al., in the first controlled study of marijuana use, found that self-reported feelings of well-being were improved with consumption of the drug, and that the intensity of these feelings was dose-dependent.Rather than being distracted from personal problems of unusual sights, sounds, or tastes, such persons may experience marijuana as a confrontational drug, which focuses attention on the very aspects of self that are currently most troublesome .While there is pointed evidence indicating that the drug affects individuals in varying manners, the subjective experiences described by users also points to a methodological problem unaddressed by previous research: different varieties of marijuana tend to elicit different results.
Hillig and Mahlberg’s review and analysis of 157 different cannabis accessions lends credibility to the anecdotal evidence reported by users; genomically, drug cultivars of cannabis are limited to two subspecies of cannabis indica , with narrow leaf plants generally producing soaring mental euphoria in users and broad-leaf plants inducing a more lethargic, body-numbing effect . The wide variation in effect is attributed to different ratios of two key cannabinoids in these plants—THC and CBD—with low amounts of CBD in narrow leaf varieties and high amounts in broad-leaf plants. Plant-induced variations in experience aside, current evidence suggests that medical users of the drug will focus on symptom alleviation in an attempt to rationalize their use; non-medical users should report using for either creative stimulation/personal insight or simply to numb themselves from reality . Accessing hidden populations—a status marijuana users, producers, and sellers are relegated to in the United States—poses two unique challenges to investigators; as Heckathorn notes: First, no sampling frame exists, so the size and boundaries of the population are unknown; and second, there exist strong privacy concerns, because membership involves stigmatized or illegal behavior, leading individuals to refuse to cooperate, or give unreliable answers to protect their privacy . To address these concerns, researchers have tradition-ally relied upon snowball sampling, key informant sampling, and targeted sampling to investigate hidden populations. The shortcomings of each approach are detailed elsewhere, but the primary concern is derived from the lack of independence between observations, which is an unassailable artifact of snowball and targeted sampling . Heckathorn’s Respondent-Driven Sampling offers an elegant addendum to chain referral procedures by limiting the number of potential recruits that each respondent can bring into a research program and incorporating both primary and secondary incentive structures into the recruitment process .