Stanford’s Undergraduate Journal in Anthropology
From the Shadows: An Ethnographic Examination of Stanford Students’ Relationships with Cannabis Joshua Cobler Abstract After the legalization of marijuana in California, cannabis held a unique legal status at Stanford University: disallowed due to prohibitions from federal law but legally accessible due to the end of restrictions by state law. This piece explores Stanford students’ relationships with cannabis in this period, identifying student usage of marijuana as tools to both build and deepen platonic social bonds and to create pathways for control within romantic and sexual relationships.
Introduction The music spilled out from the building and onto the veranda of the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, a Stanford house known among students for its biweekly Wednesday night happy hours. The name “Enchanted Broccoli Forest,” or EBF for short, actually came from the name of one of the first all-vegetarian cookbooks, or so I had been told. However, the house wasn’t known for being vegetarian, and it definitely wasn’t known for its love of vegetables; it was known for its love of another type of green. The bright, flashing lights and uncomfortable warmth from inside pushed my friends and I back outside and onto a couch on the front porch. As I sunk down further on the couch, I felt the stiffness of the the vape pen in my pocket. I pulled it out, took one deep inhale, and blew out a single, long puff of smoke. My friend Mark, already somewhat drunk from an “oddly-boozy homework night,” reached for the pen. “Fuck it,” he slurred. He put the pen up to his lips, inhaled for a little too long, and then coughed out a large cloud of smoke. “I don’t need to work for the FBI after all,” he joked before coughing again uncontrollably. Just days before, he told me in an interview about how he had been abstaining from weed for federal job purposes, but I guess the final weeks of the quarter drive people to crave an escape. One thing led to another, and soon the two of us found ourselves juvenilely competing to see who could blow the “coolest” smoke clouds. Marijuana usage at Stanford had always seemed relegated to the shadows. Whereas drinking— even for those underage—has become normalized on campus through a visible drinking culture in fraternities and nearby houses, the federal prohibition on marijuana has led many students to be less overt about their marijuana usage. But in the wake of California’s medical cannabis program and the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (Proposition 64), which legalized recreational cannabis in the state in 2016, marijuana has become easier to legally acquire for California college students (Hudak 2016). Though marijuana accessibility on campus had rapidly increased, it wasn’t clear if social attitudes were moving as quickly. In order to better understand Stanford students’ relationships to marijuana, I spoke to a variety of Stanford undergraduates who had consumed it in some fashion while in college. I propose that marijuana can take on different social roles in different social contexts, such as between friends, without a romantic component where marijuana functioned as
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