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Steve Bloom
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Friday, 19 March 2010 18:26 |
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As co-author of Pot Culture: The A-Z Guide to Stoner Language & Life, I know a few things about words - like "stoner," "pothead" and "marijuana," all of which have increasingly come under fire as disreputable terms since the book was published in 2008. Now the Wall Street Journal has added fuel to that fire with today's article, "In the Mile High City, Weed Sparks Up Counterculture Clash."
 According to the article, Warren Edson, a lawyer who runs Medical Cannabis Counsel workshops in Denver and Los Angeles, doesn't like strain names like Green Crack, AK-47 and Trainwreck. "How can I find them and strangle them?" he says about breeders who come up with these aggressive-sounding marijuana monikers.
WSJ's Stephanie Simon says Edson and others want to "make pot respectable - but decades of stoner culture keep dragging him down."
Part of this respectability involves changing the way marijuana users communicate with each other. Lately, "cannabis" is preferable to "marijuana," especially among medical patients in legal states like Colorado and California. And "stoner" and "pothead" might as well be the n- or r-word to politically correct tokers.
In Pot Culture, we provide the following definitions:
Stoner: Someone who regularly smokes marijuana
Pothead: Someone who smokes marijuana on a regular basis. The term tends to be used in a derogatory fashion, as in, "He's such a pothead."
Asked about these words for her article, I told Simon: "We should embrace those terms. This is who we are." (Check out Gawker's take on this hot-button subject.)
Recently, when Stephen Colbert called Snoop Dogg "a well-known pothead," Snoop paused and replied, "I'd say I'm a stoner."
What would you say you are? Leave a comment and let us know.
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Also see:
K2/Spice: Getting High on Synthetic Cannabinoids
More Blogs by Steve Bloom
More CelebStoner Blogs
CelebStoner News
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Remember to double-check your math.
Kiefer Kusherland
"Pothead" doesn't offend me, though some use the term in a derisive manner. I can't see finding any term that defines me as a pot smoker as negative. We will work through ignorant preconceived notions of us potheads.
We need to bring cannabis use, regardless of medical or social use, to the same acceptable levels of alcohol.
To do this we need to stop people seeing cannabis as evil, by informing them about the more than 1,500 varieties, derived from 3 main strains.
We also need to show that because of the laws the growers are using heavy chemicals that stay in the plant causing much of the problems we see. Also, street dealers are tainting cannabis even further by spraying the herb with such things as ICE, or rolling the herb in a mixture that can and often does include heroin or cocaine, again causing many of the problems many are blaming on cannabis.
We need to show the difference in Sativa and Indica, the two main strains, how high THC effects the user and how high CBD effects the user.
We can do none of this by continuing to make cannabis sound like an evil, and that is what marijuana, stoner or pothead does.
To change the public perception, users need to grow up and behave and speak like adults with functioning brains. Using derogatory terms and slang does the direct opposite.
As for the strain names, they do nothing to help the cause and the growers need to stop sabotaging the fight by using names they know will get a negative reaction.
Pothead brings Cheech and Chong to mind.
If someone called me a Pothead, I wouldn't be offended, while Stoner can be rather derogatory.
Maybe we need a new term for persons who use Cannabis as a means to spark creativity, such as Herbal Blazers or Creative Sparkers.
I also prefer using the word Cannabis over Marijuana.
On the subject of naming strains, someone should use the name Cosmos in honor of noted puffer Carl Sagan.