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Jeffrey Le
UWRT 1101
Connie Douglas
11/1/14
Ethnography
The discourse community for this ethnography is the group of smokers in the courtyard in
front of the high rise buildings, which are Moore and Scott Hall of the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte. The courtyard in front of Moore and Scott Hall is usually full of students
of the freshman class because that is where they live and the high rises are a freshman
dormitories only. The group of smokers usually take up the back of the court almost every night.
The researcher was an outsider of this discourse community at first, but he joined and
participated with the members as he goes through his observations. The community consisted of
at least ten people, six males and four females who are mainly Caucasian sitting at the tables
smoking.
The members of the discourse community are similar in looks and they have the same
point of view when it comes to recreational drugs and most of them are part of the freshman
class. The majority of the members of the group are early users in the drug culture. This
discourse community meets up every night around eight oclock pm to converse and smoke with
each other. The population of this community varies over time, but there are some of the same
people remaining in the group. Some of them actually sells drugs to make a profit to supply

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themselves with more drugs according to a member of the discourse community the researcher
interviewed. The meetings are informal, but there is a structure to the smoke sessions.
A few members of the discourse community will set up a hookah at two or three tables
depending on the day, open for other smokers. The discourse community will start off smoking
tobacco for an hour or two and then they will start smoking marijuana. The discourse community
will set up a rotation of smoking to pass around the marijuana. Whoever supplied or contributed
to the session would get their contribution first and they can use it in the session whenever they
please; they also choose who can smoke it first.
After a few more observations, the researcher concluded that the members of the
community just wanted to meet people who are just like them and that are tied in with the
culture. Their motive for setting up the smoke sessions is to make friends and spend time with
them by smoking marijuana and enjoy themselves. The members all use the same way of
speaking when they converse with each other. They use slang to cut out people who are against
marijuana so they wouldnt interrupt them or know about their sessions and plans. The language
that this discourse community used is street talk. The members of the group use a lot of slang
when talking to one another. They would use words that have multiple meanings. An example of
this is the word straight, used in terms of slang, this term means okay, alright, good, and
fine.
New members of the subculture learn this way of speaking through observations of early
users in the group (Johnson 51). When new members join the smoke circle, they learn new argot

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terms from older members. The more people learning these argot terms, the more it spreads
around making it easy to access more drugs. A word most commonly used is bud (Johnson
51). This word is a generic term for marijuana and there is no specification on the quality or
strain (Johnson 53).
Slang or argot is crucial when it comes to making purchases from other dealers according
to a member of the discourse community. Argot is used to be discrete when purchasing drugs. As
these new members of this discourse community become regular users, they become more active
in the activities and form a network the member said. The network that is created is a network of
sellers to get more marijuana for themselves (Johnson 52). The network can be utilized to form
smoke sessions. The session is created after the process of middleman; a group of people who
are a part of the session give money to the buyer or the middleman and the buyer brings back the
goods (Johnson 52). The buyer who is the middleman will use his or her network of drug dealers
to look for options of strains of marijuana to buy. This is probably how most of the smoke
sessions occur on the courtyard in front of the high rises.
When the researcher asked one of the members the reason why he started smoking. He
just said that it was for fun and another person said it was because they were bored. One girl told
the researcher that it was because it helps her out when she is coping. After the girls answer the
researcher was curious on whether people smoke marijuana because of depression and if
marijuana in early users cause depression. There was a study where a sample of early marijuana
users in the United States were surveyed on their mental state and why they used it (Green 43).
The results of the survey of the sample showed that most of the late marijuana users are copers.
They used marijuana to cope with their uncontrollable feelings (Green 42). Most people in the
sample of early marijuana users are in a good mental state and this results show that marijuana

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cant be the cause of depression due to the results of the surveys the researcher saw. The results
from the studies/surveys show that poor mental health is not caused by marijuana use (Green 48).
Greens article concluded that marijuana can work as a treatment for depression since it is used
as a stress reliever. Basically, the reason why most people started using marijuana is because its
used to cope and it is fun due to the effects of Tetrahydrocannabinol.
The researcher also asked how a male member of the discourse communitys grades were
and he said that he doesnt care about them and the other members agree. This is an evidence to
the assumption that early drug users do not do well in school and their education level is low.
Early exposure to drugs reduce educational work, interpersonal opportunities, and relationships
(Gundy 246). When teens have an early exposure to drugs, they end up having hard transitions to
adulthood (Gundy 246). Gundys research makes sense because the early marijuana users were
stress free and they end up not caring about their higher education. The members of the discourse
community are an example of this, since most of them dont care.
The members told the researcher about the other drugs that they used. The researcher
asked the members if their choice to use other drugs was influenced by the use of marijuana and
they said that they just wanted to try something new. This is evidence to why marijuana is
considered the gateway drug to most people. The correlation of early drug users and their abuse
of other illicit drugs is high. The reason why it seems that marijuana is a gateway drug is due to
the lack of conventional social bonds (Gundy 246). The link to marijuana users and abuse of
illicit drugs is dependent on social roles and education level (Gundy 246). The results of a study
shows that teens and adolescents are more likely to use other drugs because their role in society
has the most exposure to stress due to the transition to adulthood. The gateway effect is

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contingent upon age (Gundy 254). This research can potentially be an answer to why so many
adolescents use drugs because there is not a lot of reliable research on this topic.
The researcher asked how long has this community been around campus and the group
told him that it has been on campus for a while. When the researcher asked to specify how long,
the members do not know. They guessed that the group has been on campus for as long as the
tables were added to the courtyard, which makes sense. There is no exact time of date of when it
was created.
This discourse community has been around for a while and it will continue to grow as
new members learn the slang and get trained by early users about their culture. The members of
this community have different reasons for starting. Some people smoke marijuana because of
stress, some smoke because they need to cope with their feelings and some use drugs to repress
them. This discourse community is only a small portion of the drug culture in the United States
of America.

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Works Cited
Green, Brian E. "Marijuana Use and Depression." Journal of Health and Social Behavior
41.1 (2000): 40-49. JSTOR. Web. 3 Nov. 2014.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2676359?ref=no-xroute:57f97aa41a1f34b0ca66ba112f9afde6>.
Gundy, Karen Van. "A Life-course Perspective on the "Gateway Hypothesis"" Journal of
Health and Social Behavior 51.3 (2010): 244-59. JSTOR. Web. 2 Nov. 2014.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20798290?ref=no-xroute:24afd4be20451fe865c00c8d6d60be11>.
Johnson, Bruce D. "MARIJUANA ARGOT AS SUBCULTURE THREADS: Social
Constructions by Users in New York City." The British Journal of Criminology 46.1 (2006): 4677. JSTOR. Web. 5 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/23639330?ref=no-xroute:daea1b93739eec4e0d401f950db846c4>.