Marijuana Argot as Subculture Threads: Social Constructions by Users in New York City
This presentation makes specific contributions to the study of argot as a central component of the
communication system within a subculture and markets focused upon this one illegal commodity. The
primary focus is upon marijuana-specific argot as socially constructed ways of talking, thinking,
communicating, and interacting among marijuana users and distributors. The dynamic nature of argot
delineates important distinctions within and helps organize and integrate how the marijuana subculture
regulates use practices, networks, and markets. The result is a relatively unique communication system that is
largely hidden from the mainstream of American culture, but is understood by many marijuana-using youth
and by commercial markets for music. Unlike the many seminal contributions of David Maurer (1981) and
others (Lerman 1967, Kaplan, Kempe, Farfan 1990) which stressed the central function of argot as
maintaining secrecy so as to hide subculture communications from outsiders, our contribution to the study of
marijuana-related argot finds that the secrecy function is considerably less important to participants than the
functions of expressiveness, in-group communication, and subculture integration.
Indeed, marijuana-related argot—the words or terms themselves—constitute important symbols that
are highly expressive of how participants feel and think about marijuana use, describe the rituals and conduct
norms, and define market (purchase and sales) practices that constitute the marijuana subculture. These argot
terms constitute the linguistic background and verbal threads by which diverse social networks of marijuana
users routinely interact and communicate with each other across all demographic and regional differences.
These argot terms are socially constructed and invented by persons; some of these terms are verbally shared,
become popular, and spread (are socially transmitted) among marijuana subculture participants. The continual
creation of new argot terms means that older argot words remain known but fall out of popularity and
effectively cease to be used among current argot users.
The multi-cultural nature of marijuana’s long and varied history has produced a rich terminology that
has roots in different places and locales. Marijuana argot can be distinguished from marijuana-related jargon
and slang. Jargon is “the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group”
especially educated elites (Dictionary 1993). Jargon contains specialized words that are public, usually written
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Convention