The effects of marijuana: a social psychological interpretation

BECAUSE OF MARIJUANA'S apparent widespread and growing use, and possible future decriminalization, there is understandable concern about the effects of marijuana on behavior. However, in any serious deliberation about effects on behavior, two divergent views are equally unacceptable: that of the naive medical moralizer, who believes that marijuana turns people into vicious criminals; and that of the uncritical humanist, who holds that it affects everyone differently. The first position, characterized here as medical, moves from drug to behavior as though the latter were wholly physiological and a more or less predictably invariant function of the former. The second position, uncritical humanism, views the world as a composite of more of less free human elements which remain inscrutable and unpredictable, regardless of whether any individual is straight or high. Somewhere between these antipodal positions of absolute uniformity and absolute uniformity and absolute diversity lies the reality of patterned variability--i.e., types of users and types of effects of use. Situational factors such as when, where, with whom, and the like are admittedly important, but I propose here to limit attention to the user as social psychological actor in order to reduce analysis to a manageable number of parameters.